Natural Chenin Blanc 2016

The dry 2016 vintage saw our old Chenin Blanc vineyard hardly giving us a crop. In a normal year we average between 3-4 tons per hectare. In 2016 we got about 0.9 tonnes per hectare. We picked the grapes rather late despite the dry year waiting for the sugar to pick up. The fruit tasted amazing with a very fresh acidity. The grapes were whole bunch pressed, yielding clear and fresh juice.  We decided not to do an overnight settling and took the juice directly to 300l, 2^nd fill barrel for natural ferment. We ended up getting just 3 beautiful barrels of wine from the entire vineyard.  The must fermented in barrel in a cold room. After ferment we kept the wine in the cold room for maturation, trying to inhibit the secondary fermentation. In January this year we racked it out of barrel under a blanket of ‘dry ice’ and bottled it the next day without any fining, filtration, or SO2.