Vintage 2024 - The starting line

The beauty of vintage:

the late evenings,

the early mornings,

the achy muscles,

the sublime aromas of fresh ferments,

the hard work of taking nets off,

the wonderful relief of not seeing those nets for another year,

the joy of plunging grapes,

the anxious wait for wine to drip out of the press and that it will be everything you hoped,

the washing of new barrels and that smell of new oak that is so unique

Vintage has started and we are receiving such wonderful fruit.

Serves 4

Ingredients:

2 crayfish tails (1/2 crayfish tail per person), peeled and diced into 2cm pieces

2 cloves of garlic finely chopped or crushed

1 punnet of ripe cherry tomatoes cut in half

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

350g spaghetti

125ml white wine

200ml double cream

3 tbsp roughly chopped Italian parsley

Method:

The key to this dish is to have the pasta ready at the same time as the crayfish and sauce.

Prepare all ingredients prior to starting to cook.

Boil a large pot of salted water. Add pasta and cook as per the instructions on the packet.

Heat oil in the pan on medium/high head. Add garlic and stir until aromatic and just cooked. Do not allow it to burn. Throw in tomatoes and stir for a minute, then add crayfish and stir to combine. Stir for 2 minutes until just cooked. Add white wine to the pan and reduce slightly. Add in double cream and stir through.

Drain the pasta and pour into the pan along with the parsley. Toss through gently, season with salt (if required) and freshly ground black pepper serve. Once plated, add a drizzle of quality extra virgin olive oil.

Whilst some may protest, we do add a little quality shaved parmesan.

From all the tasting events we have been involved in, Chardonnay is a variety that seems to create such different reactions from people. I believe this is because there is such a diversity in the methods that the wine is made, between different winemakers, along with the influence between regions it is grown, and lastly if the Chardonnay is bottled under a screw cap or cork.

There are some winemaking techniques that endeavour to have the wine taken from vineyard and placed straight into a press as whole bunches with the subsequent juice going into tank or barrels for fermentation. Where on the other spectrum of wine making the grapes are separated from their stalks and sit on skins for a period of time prior to going to press then subsequently to barrel or tank for fermenting. Our preference is the second method as we are of the belief that structure is built into the wine when it has time on skins prior to pressing.

Where Chardonnay is grown can provide such differences in the end result. The amount of direct sun light and the intensity of this sunlight does change the flavour profile of Chardonnay more so than many other varieties. Our preference is for the vines to have speckled direct sunlight on the grape bunches to help create thicker skins, which in turn assists in the extract of flavour profiles during our wine making where we are having direct skin contact for a period of time as part of the process.

Of late we have been using screw caps when bottling our Chardonnay, but we will be looking at doing a mixture of both wine under screw cap and cork in the future as there is a further complexity created in bottle under cork that we believe suits our style of Chardonnay.