Noble Late Harvest

Please note: Award stickers are applied at the producer's discretion and may not be present on all bottles.

Noble Late Harvest or NLH are wines made from grapes infected with noble rot. Officially known as Botrytis Cinerea, which is a fungus which attaches itself to the skins of grapes. Crucially, it doesn’t cause the skins to split; it simply leeches out the water, making the sugars and acids in the grapes super-concentrated. The grapes are carefully hand-harvested at 42 Balling and crushed. The sweetness levels of the resulting grape juice are so high that it would be impossible for a yeast to ever ferment the wine to dry. Instead, it gives up, dies, is removed from the wine and the result is small quantities of luscious, sweet dessert wine.

The Viognier vineyards are planted in north-west facing blocks overlooking the dam in sandy, gravelly and highly weathered soils with a clay substructure. The aspect of the vineyard and climatic conditions are essential ingredients in creating a NLH as you need two specific weather conditions to occur on the same day – misty mornings to encourage the fungus to grow, and then sunny afternoons which arrest that growth and stop the fungus turning into the unusable grey rot. Despite the winemakers best efforts, one can never be certain of a successful harvest and therefore this wine is only made in exceptional years.

The wine are matured in 3rd fill French oak barrels for 12 months.