If you love picnics, eating fresh food and watching the sun setting into the sea, you'll love my range of wine called Fish Hoek. This wine is all about the unpretentious, sun-filled lifestyle of Cape Town, South Africa. Enjoy.
Components:
· Merlot 85%
· Cabernet Sauvignon 13.2%
· Cabernet Franc 1.8%
Tasting notes:
On the nose, soft red fruits and stewed cherries. Leads into flavours of black cherry, toffee and earth framed by moderate, silky tannins and a lingering finish. This is a medium bodied wine with good fruit flavours and easy drinkability
Vinification:
Grapes were hand picked from the 5th of February until the 2nd of March 2004 on farms in the Tulbagh, Voor-Paardeberg and Robertson areas. (24.9-25.6ºBalling)
Grapes were stored in our cold room overnight and crushed after which all small parts of stems were removed by hand on a sorting table. 15% were left as whole berries. Components from different production areas were fermented separate. Cold maceration on the skins for 1 – 2 weeks at 0 – 10ºC, with one cold soak punch down per day.
Fermentation takes place in the open top fermenters with punch downs every 4 hours, 24 hours of the day, at 25 – 30ºC. Post fermentation maceration 0 – 1 week. Pressing & barreling down is done without the use of pumps – only gravity flow. Wine is being matured for 10 months in 2/3 new American Oak (<5% new French Oak) barrels and the rest older French- & American Oak.
Barrels get stirred once a month to increase lees contact, before the first racking (October 2004). Each individual barrel gets tasted a minimum of three times during the maturation period in order to select the best ones for Fish Hoek Merlot 2004.
Wine was sterile filtered before bottling on the 21st of February 2005.
Analysis: Alc: 14.56, RS: 3.56, pH: 3.56, TA: 6.05
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