Vintage is over for another year, and this week’s job has been to get our 2023 red wines into barrel. The first step was to taste all the barrels of 2022 reds so that we can empty them for refilling with 2023 reds. 2022 was a big year, so there were over 60 barrels. Howard & Christobelle spent a day making our way through these and allocating each barrel to which wine we thought they should go to (eg. sparkling, Storyteller, Cellar block etc). Barrels from the same original batch of wine can be different, depending on the barrel it was aged in (new/old, different oaks etc), so they can sometimes end up being used for different wines.

The following day we set up bench tastings and line up the contender barrels for each wine to taste side by side and as trial blends. We also need to crunch the numbers on how many litres that will give us of each wine and whether we have a commercially appropriate distribution of wines / price points. There is definite leeway here to allow for vintage variation and keeping true to our house style and quality parameters, but sometimes there are barrels that could go into either of two wines and the numbers can help decide which way we go.