Our introduction to winemaking
We’ve spoken a lot about the wine growing journey and the process we went through out among the vines but not as much about the winemaking journey and our experiences among the vats.
We set out to create light, yet characterful wines with distinct flavours. However, our journey couldn’t start until we’d found a winemaker who would treat our grapes with the utmost care and attention. After a thorough search, we met Halfpenny Green Estate in the Midlands, another family run vineyard, with over 30 years of experience making fantastic English Wines.
Our first Solaris harvest was happily sent to Halfpenny Green but our Bacchus grapes were a less happy story with mildew destroying the majority of the crop. Fortunately, a highly respected grower in Bedfordshire had surplus Bacchus grapes and to keep our prospects of introducing two wines this year alive we bought these into a vat we’d reserved for our own Bacchus.
Over the course of the next six months we were endlessly back and forth between the vineyard and the winery at Halfpenny sampling the wines at various stages of the vinification process. We made so many trips, not only to taste the wine and understand how we could bring out the unique flavours of the grapes, but also to broaden our own understanding of the winemaking process. To our immense delight, the Solaris developed its flavours very early in and we were truly taken aback that these grapes grown on home soil could create wine tasting so good and importantly so full of flavour. However, the Bacchus was reticent and still needed time to develop. With the benefit of hindsight this was serendipitous as we now had the opportunity to make impactful winemaking decisions.
At the time we were concerned that the Bacchus might never show us its full potential, in this instance patience was most certainly a virtue we needed. Eventually, flavours did develop in abundance, but they were disjointed and to bring them together we needed to introduce post-fermentation processes. In this case we decided to add oak chips to the vat to bring the characteristics of oak barrel ageing to the wine, without making the wine “oaky”. This is where the winemaker really went above and beyond for us, tasting the wine every week and contacting us when they tasted any change in flavour.
Clearly keeping the vines on track in the vineyard is vital to their success but creating the flavours we envisaged from the outset took patience, expert guidance, a keen palate and confidence in our approach. We couldn’t be happier with the results. Both light, dry wines, the Solaris has tropical notes with a refreshing acidity and a warming finish. The Bacchus has juicy citrus notes with hints of elderflower.
