The exceptionally warm and dry growing season of 2019 provided the ideal conditions to make our very first sweet Pinot Gris. Specially selected vines of ripened pinot gris fruit were ‘cordon cut’, allowing the bunches to shrivel and the sugar concentration to slowly accumulate. After four weeks the now-tiny berries had reached over 350g/L of sugar and the small crop was hand harvested and very slowly pressed to extract the intensely sweet juice.

The slow, cool fermentation in stainless steel tank eventually stopped with a residual sweetness of 135g/L. A very small percentage of dry, whole-bunch fermented Pinot gris harvested from the uncut crown of the vines was added back to the wine to give some textural complexity, then the blend prepared for bottling in early August.