2022 Graciano Syrah

The difficult one. Graciano is the last variety that we picked and so it experiences every single event of a growing season. We take fruit from 5 different NSW regions and see first hand the various challenges that arise due to seasonal changes. For instance, during wet seasons, there is a high incidence of disease pressure, and plants tend to experience accelerated vegetative growth. Potentially the plants themselves are less balanced and the fruit can have unfavourable YANs (yeast assimilable nitrogen) to promote strong saccharomyces growth. As we get roughly 50% different fruit each year (80% different in 2022) we often don't have experience with some of the vineyards and fruit we buy from. In this case, we learned that this graciano has a strong vineyard brettanomyces fermentation. This has happened twice now from different vineyards in different years (2019 and 2022). We blended the graciano with syrah to lower the savoury character. This wine is an excellent example of how vineyard derived brettanomyces isn't a flaw and can give wine an interesting balance between fruit and savouriness.