“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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09 March 2018

PICKING THE HIGH SANDS GRENACHE

Out my back door: pickers in Yangarra's High Sands Grenache, harvesting fruit like this:



Once it's been through the destemmer and grape sorter, which removes all the bugs that were hiding in the bunches as well as the stalks, petiols and leaves, it comes out like caviar, ready to go straight in the fermenter. Yangarra doesn't use the crusher much.


I've rarely seen such a calm, steady vintage. Here's some of the early-pick PF - preservative free - Shiraz draining from a fermenter into a basket press:

photos by Philip White

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

grape sorter, which removes all the bugs that were hiding in the bunches

Removing the bugs! It's not wine if it doesn't have some bugs in there. Redback spiders have a special flavour.

Richard Warland said...

Early for Grenache! Should make a Rhone-style red. I'd love to know what it will be sold as.

DRINKSTER said...

One selected patch of the vineyard goes into Yangarra High Sands Grenache; the rest becomes Yangarra Old Vine Grenache.