The wine formerly know as 'Tinto".
Seems like this generic term has gone out of favour in the Australia market place. I put it down to the fact that there was an explosion of wine called such back in the heady days of the first year of our most recent pandemic.
Back then all sense of temperance with alcohol consumption went out the window with our perceived freedoms. Like sure you can lock us up but we are going down fighting. Not only are we going to raise chickens, become artisan potterers and bakers plus harbour toilet paper with blind panic - I always note that this is where the pandemic shows always missed, the mark, sure Matt Damon had to wear masks, socially distance and bury his wife, but where was all the dunny paper - we are going to drink like there's no fucking tomorrow.
So there was a boom demand for anything alcoholic so every man and his dog went about making booze as quick as they could. The so called 'park wines', that inevitably were called generic names like aforesaid Tinto, plus the gin market went crazy.
Even though you could say Tinto, in the case of a blend of these these classic Spanish varieties, was totally apt a name as opposed to some weird blend of whatever to booming negoitant producers could find like cabernet and the like, we did decide to change to a varietal naming but we still call it Tinto in our minds.
The 2023 Season was the third in a run of cooler, wetter years. I rejoiced in these having seen the worst the climate could do in 2020 so I wasn't in the camp of complaining about a little rain. That said, 2023 had the wettest spring we'd seen but we have the right equipment to be able to look after our vines in these conditions. Light weight tractors, trailed implements, minimal use all meant we could get access when needed and weren't bogging tractors which was pretty common.
2023 was also a very late season. From Budburst in mid-October to harvest in late April, everything just took time. There was a little rain during harvest that caused some issue but form the most part us and all our growers had a very good year.
Our Tinto is part of the regional collection where we access fruit from our greater region including the Canberra district, Hilltops, Tumbarumba & Gundagai GI's.
This is a pretty complex blend with Tempranillo coming in from three growers: Quarry Hill near us, Freeman vineyards at Kingsvale in the Hilltops and Simon Locke in Gundagai. The Graciano is also from Freeman and Garnacha from Quarry Hill.
So a true regional blend.
Harvest started on the 20th March with the Gundagai fruit arriving and finished by the 19th April with the lovely Graciano. Each of the 5 batches was fermented separetly in 1t open top fermenters.
We use this neat little Bucher Oscillys detemmer which, when fed slowly with the vibrating receival hopper, allows for very gentle separation of the berries from the bunch stems. This leave essentially whole berries rather than mushed up must that most systems give as we also don't use a must pump. The destemmed fruit is moved via an escalators to the fermenters.
Fermentation commenced after a couple of days, we've never used packaged microbes in this winery so everything is pretty wild. Likewise we don't use PMS (Potassium Metabisulphite) so the little biomass the fruit has can effectively ferment out all the grape sugars over a few weeks.
Generally the fermentation and maceration lasts 3 - weeks where we are waiting for the cap to sink. This generally means most of the CO2 has aspirated out of the ferments so there's little protection.
Each batch was then pressed and settled overnight then racked off gross lees to a range of oak puncheons (500L) and Barriques (228l). No new oak here, mostly 3-5 year old vessels.
The wine is then tucked away in our cellars for the rest of the year. Malolactic fermentation, like the primary, takes place on its own accord over winter. The batches were racked off lees in the following February, blended, returned to the barrles until June 2024 when we started bottling.