Thursday, 23 July 2015 12:47

A chablis influence

Written by 
Andrew Greenhough. Andrew Greenhough.

The wine industry is a vibrant, ever-changing industry that throws up new challenges with each vintage.

However people also need something new to keep them fresh and motivated rather than repeating the same thing every year. That has been part of the inspiration behind Andrew Greenhough exploring a new Chardonnay style since 2012.

The Greenhough Espérance is a Chablis influenced Chardonnay that Greenhough says he is doing for himself as much as anything. It is a style of wine he enjoys and producing it is a way of keeping the winery business interesting. He also enjoys seeing the potential of his vineyard being expressed in new ways.  

What Greenhough didn’t want was a simple Chardonnay or simply an unoaked Chardonnay. He wanted something that would express the characters he saw in fruit from his vineyard and the ripe acidity in the fruit was one of the motivations. 

When it comes to trying something new and refining it over a number of years he says; “for me there still has to be a very well informed plan, a broader picture about decision making not just ‘giving it a go’.  This started with his assistant winemaker spending a vintage in Chablis to glean as much as she could about winemaking techniques in the region. Things like juice turbidity, barrel versus tank ferment and maturation, fermention temperatures and many other small elements that contribute to the wines of Chablis. He says “this becomes the starting point of a plan for your own experience establishing what works for your fruit and your market.”

In creating a Chablis influenced wine Greenhough says making decisions to express the characteristics of the fruit is vital; pick it too soon and the acidity isn’t ripe, pick it too late and the ripe fruit characters can over-power the elegance he is striving for. His vineyard tends towards low pH and ripe citrus-focussed acidity and he wanted “to create a style that allows these characters to be expressive in the wine without the winemaking influence becoming the star of the show.” 

The mineral character of the fruit from his Hope Vineyard is another factor he has had to consider in his winemaking decisions. For him this minerality is a sensation with a gentle saline, stoney character. 

“French wines can have quite firm mineral and fresh characters without being tart. There is often just a fresh sensation without the taste of acid” and that is something he is using as a guiding influence in the making of Espérance.

Espérance is not an unoaked Chardonnay, the whole strategy for the style is about building something that has complexity based on calculated winemaking decisions. Greenhough says; “not having oak as a dominant component means I have one thing less to get wrong. Chardonnay is a challenging variety anyway and that challenge is part of the appeal.” 

He has made a conscious decision to allow time for complexities from lees to develop by leaving it in well-seasoned barrels for six months before sitting in stainless steel tanks for another 12 months. This also leaves him scope for barrel ferment to bring in other layers of complexity in future vintages as he refines this style.

While the winemakers at Greenhough Vineyards are experimenting with skin ferments in other white varieties that result in a phenolic structure, with this Chablis style the structure is in the acidity. As a wine style, Espérance is a slightly lower alcohol wine, about 13 percent instead of the normal14 percent he gets from his fruit, but with ripe acidity and a linear structure.  

The evolution in development of this wine hasn’t been without its challenges, his assistant winemaker moved on to a new opportunity after the vintage in Chablis but not before she had passed on some valuable information. Greenhough says change always brings something new and positive but being a small business and small winery operation he is really reliant on the input others bring. 

“You can’t do it all on your own. 

 “Converting the vineyard to organic (BioGro certified in 2011),  was a challenge and introduced the potential for something new, it was re-invigorating keeping us proactive instead of repeating the same old stuff. The wine industry is a creative business and that is part of its appeal. The more you think about it , the more you see new directions and the more interesting life is.” 

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