Nomads Garden Pinot Noir 2021

Handmade - Hand Picked & Sorted - Hand Plunged - Basket Pressed - No Acid or Enzymes Added - Natural Wild Yeast Ferment - Barrel Aged on Lees – Unfined

Single Vineyard - Greenacres Vineyard, Alpine Valley

Grower - Brian “Bri” Llewis

Sourced from one of the most passionate salt of the earth growers we know in Brian “Bri” Llewis from his spectacular Greenacres Vineyard in Merriang South. This vineyard is deep in an isolated valley of the sprawling Alpine Valleys GI and such a cool site it is not unusual for it to snow there a couple of times over the winter period.

As with all wines released under the Nomads Garden range input from us in the winery was kept to an absolute minimum. Instead careful attention was paid to working closely with Bri and ensuring the grapes were picked at exactly the right moment to ensure the natural pH and the flavours were just right.

Unlike many Pinot vineyards in the North East this is a Vineyard dedicated to growing fruit for table wine not sparkling base, this means it is cropped at much lower levels.

Handpicked and sorted in the vineyard at daybreak with a baume of 12.6, 2021 was a very cool and mild growing season and the flavors developed early allowing us to pick at a nice fresh baume as to retain natural acidity and vitality. Unfortunately yields in this vineyard were down about 40% in 2021, a cruel blow after Bri lost his entire crop in 2020 to smoke taint, it has also meant that we have just a tick over 300 dozen this year, less than usual.

Once in the winery the fruit was chilled for 24 hours. Three separate ferments were undertaken:

• Ferment 1 – 1.8 Tonnes, Dijon Clone 667 - 73% gently destemmed as to retain whole berries, the remaining 27% was destemmed and crushed to give a layer of concentration. 72 hour cold soak. Ferment was gently hand plunged once daily and rose to 31c at the end of ferment, no refrigeration was required. Pressed after 15 days on skins.

• Ferment 2 – 1.12 Tonnes, Dijon Clone 667 – 90% of the fruit was gently destemmed but not crushed so as to retain whole berries, the remaining 10% was included as whole bunches as a layer through the middle of the ferment. 72 hour cold soak. Hand plunged gently once daily. This was a vigorous wild ferment and rose to 33c at 5 baume at which point the cooling was turned on to bring it back to 29c for the remainder of the ferment. 13 days on skins.

• Ferment 3 – 1.48 Tonnes, MV6 Clone – Carbonic Maceration was encouraged in this ferment with 30% whole bunches on the bottom of the ferment with whole berries on top. No cold soak was undertaken, instead the variable capacity tank was sealed and left alone for a week. Once opened we were hit with the beautiful perfume that is a hallmark of carbonic maceration. Once the lid was taken off it was pumped over and the ferment got going and fermented nice and steadily to dryness over the following week. No cooling was required. Pumped over for 5 minutes once daily to simply wet the cap. We do not encourage extraction in any of our wines, especially Pinot. We believe the region naturally produces fruit with an abundance of tannin therefore there is no need to encourage extraction through pump over regimes as we strive to make elegant paired back wines. 12 days on skins.

Post fermentation all three ferments were gently basket pressed to 5+ year old French oak Puncheons and Barriques. Oak of this age will impart very little, if any oak characteristics, instead we believe they are the best vessel for wines to ferment and age in. Oak is a natural living product that allows the wines to breath and evolve with time, something not possible with tanks.

A total of 7 months in oak on full lees (lees are the solids that drop and of the wine post fermentation) to build texture. The wine was then lightly filtered and hand bottled on site at our winery. The resultant wine is more delicate than the previous iterations, a result of the lovely mild growing season. Vegan Friendly.