CAT | Mullineux Wines
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FT, Malo & Stephane
0 Comments | Posted by chris in Hospice du Rhone, Mullineux Wines, White Blends
Another nice mention on our wines over the weekend, this time by Jancis Robinson as one of her sugestions for Summer drinking in the Northern Hemisphere, in the Financial Times. Here’s her comment:
Mullineux White 2008 Swartland
Super-talented new operation in South Africa makes the most of old bushvines in a recently revived region. Very complex blend for the money. Should age well.
FT Weekend - Food and Wine
This is interesting reading as tasting the wine recently we feel the 2008 White is possibly reaching a phase where it is settling down and tightening up, and does indeed look like it will age well. If you try a bottle we suggest decanting it, or drinking over a couple of days.
It also gives food for thought on our 2009 White which we are in the process of releasing. The ‘09 vintage of the wine only completed 50% of its malolactic fermentation, and as a result of the higher malic acid content tastes fresher and tighter, and almost more alive. It’s interesting to taste the two wines next to each other.
And, in a third related note, we had a bottle of 2008 Voignier de Rosine from Stephane Ogier over the weekend. Stephane was one of the speakers at this years Hospice du Rhone, and this was the first wine he presented in his seminar. If I remember correctly (we were a bit cloudy after the Margharitas he was buying us the night before…), he prefers not to allow his Viognier to go through malo, and this wine certainly benifits from the increased freshness. Maybe this is something we producers in the Swartland should look at…?
The most important thing in a winery is not the press, destemmer, pump, or any other piece of equipment you use. It’s not even the kind of barrels you carefully choose…. the most important thing in a winery is probably the floors! They must be solid, stable, drain easily, or otherwise you spend your whole life cleaning them. We’ll get to earthy topics soon, but today we started installing another important item – the Cooling.
Fortunately the building we’ve taken over has pretty good insulation, but in the middle of Summer, Riebeek gets pretty warm, and the building still warms to the low 20’s Celsius. Ideally we’d want the temperature to be 16 Celsius and below, so we have to install some serious cooling to bring the large volume of air down. We can’t simply install air-conditioners as they dry the air out, and this leads to increased evaporation of water from the wine maturing in barrel causing us to lose wine, and increasing the alcohol content at the same time.
Offloading Chiller
To combat this we are installing a water based chilling system that will keep the humidity relatively high.
It’s a large, costly system to install, but a vital one!
After two and a half years of searching, we’ve finally found a Swartland home for our wines! Headquarters will from now on be at No. 1 Short Street, Riebeek Kasteel.
The building has for the last few years been run as a Hardware store, but we’ve always thought it would be a perfect winery, and have been working on the owners to let us take it over as our home base.
No. 1 Short Street, Riebeek Kasteel
Finally they agreed, and the next few weeks will see us making a few upgrades to the building – mostly to the insulation, cooling and electrics. We’re also building a store for our wine library, and we hope to have moved in by Christmas!
