Spring Vale Melrose Pinot Noir 2019 (12 x 750mL), TAS.

Winemaking Notes

This wine is made primarily from fruit sourced from our “Melrose” vineyard, just over the river to the north from Spring Vale. The 2018 vintage has also been supplemented with fruit from our 6 hectares of young vines planted at Spring Vale over the last 5 years. This includes a portion of Pinot Meunier (approx. 3%) which contributes a subtle earthiness to the resulting wine. The bulk of the Melrose fruit parcels are inoculated by adding yeast as the berries are dispersed through the crusher/destemmer and this ensures a rapid onset of primary fermentation, our goal being to shorten the overall time on skins and avoid excessive tannin extraction for this lighter style Pinot Noir. We also co-inoculate with a lactic acid bacteria strain that thrives in the warm fermenting juice, enabling early completion of malo and a softer mouthfeel in the wine. The wine is drained after 7-10 days and the skins lightly pressed, following which we create the Melrose blend. After settling this is racked, sulphured, lightly fined to pull out some tannin and aid filterability, cross-flow filtered and sterile filtered at bottling. Total production in this vintage of “Melrose” Pinot was close to 5,500 dozen.