Labs 2

This wine for me is what the Flint Wine Club is all about. A pure experiment, but not a safe one.

I’ve always wanted to stop a fermentation early and make a wine which is sweet due to natural sugars. In the UK and Germany it is common to back sweeten still white wines with suss-reserve or concentrated grape juice in order to balance the acidity. This isn’t something I like doing at Flint as I prefer to achieve a natural balance by getting the acid right in the fruit.

About two-thirds of the way through the fermentation, in the thick of harvest we identified two fermenting Bacchus wines that were tasting really good. One was in concrete and the other in foudre (large format oak tank). So both wines were already quite unusual in this respect.

We took about 450 litres of each and blended them together with the addition of about 100 litres Sauvignon Blanc juice that was cold-settling. This juice had not yet begun fermentation and it was fresh, sweet, tropical and zesty. Flavours you don’t usually taste in the final wine.

The blend was crossflow filtered to 0.45 μm, enough to make it free from bacteria and yeast and to prevent a fermentation happening in bottle with the residual sugar. The wine was then bottled immediately and laid down for release until now.

The resulting wine is our sweetest yet with 35 g/L residual sugar. This puts it in the territory of a semi-sweet German wine, but not quite as sweet as a typical Spätlese. But the acidity really cuts through and gives the wine a focus and clarity that sings.