Riesling
Regardless of wine style our priorities in Riesling are balance and fruit purity. We hand harvest the cleanest, healthiest bunches and cool-ferment in stainless steel. This allows the wine to tell its story of soil and surroundings with greatest clarity.
Hope Vineyard Riesling includes some of our oldest producing vines planted in 1976. It is off-dry and succulent, yet alive and energetic. Apple Valley Riesling is a lighter style displaying juicy sweet fruit off-set by a mouth-wateringly fresh finish.
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2023 Apple Valley Riesling
“It’s alluring and enticing on the nose with mandarin, lemon sorbet, crunchy apple and white floral aromas, followed by a finely focused palate that’s concentrated and linear. Wonderfully enhanced by elegant sweetness and beautifully infused acidity, finishing persistent and delectable. Style : Medium-dry. At its best: now – 2035” 96 Points, Wine Orbit, July 2024
“Oh, Apple Valley, how do I love thee?. . the purity of apple, luscious lime and heavenly honeysuckle flavours make it one of my favourite NZ rieslings. It’s also really hard to put the glass down, but that’s ok because it’s only 9.53 per cent alcohol. Plus there’s a sherbet-like zing in every sip, it’s crunchy and concentrated and it bursts with banging natural sweetness balanced by racy acidity…” Yvonne Lorkin, NZ Herald, March 2024
“Pure, ripe, fresh and lifted bouquet with scents of lime and apple, plenty of white flowers and steely mineral core. An off-dry expression with a fresh lick of sweetness as the wine touches the palate. Flavours of apples and limes, flinty mineral core with a gentle spritz-like quality that dances across the palate. Perfectly balanced and well made with a lengthy finish. A lovely aperitif style with perfect drinking from day of purchase through 2035”. 94 Points, Cameron Douglas MS, 24 April 2024
“The 2022 Riesling Apple Valley is a ripe, juicy, sweet and apple-filled white. It is succulent and approachable with fine nectarine and sweet apple-like flavours on the clean and drawn-out finish. Calls for roast pork.” Rebecca Gibb MW , Vinous – NZ Whites: The Great Divide (Apr 2023)
This Riesling is grown on the home vineyard from vines planted in 1996. We harvest fruit while sugar levels are low taking only the cleanest of fruit to promote the purest flavours. Fruit is hand picked, gently whole bunch pressed and settled before it is inoculated with a low vigour, aromatic yeast and cool tank-fermented. As sugar and acidity come into balance the wine is rapidly chilled to stop the fermentation. The Apple Valley style typically sits somewhere between 25 and 35 grams of residual sugar with alcohol in the lower range of 9-10.5 percent. Key to the style is a precise balance between retained sweetness and mouth-watering acidity. Delicate citrus florals combine with fresh, red apples, nectarines and flinty notes. The palate is light yet deliciously juicy and sweetly fruited. This sweetness is underpinned by a lively, intensifying acidity which emerges seamlessly and extends to a long and elegantly refreshing finish.
Alcohol: 9.53% TA: 7.6 g/L pH: 2.9 Residual sugar: 25 g/L Bottled: August 2023
2015 Hope Vineyard Riesling – SOLD OUT
“Crisply, dryly floral with a real aromatic intensity, this wine [Hope Vineyard] is invariably one of the finest Rieslings in the country in any vintage.” Keith Stewart, The Great Wines of New Zealand 2005
“This is an elegantly concentrated complex dry Riesling with lime fruit and secondary toast, mineral and kero notes on a fine-textured line.” 18.5+/20 Raymond Chan
“Certified organic, the 2014 vintage (4*) was mostly handled in tanks, but 30 per cent was fermented in old oak barrels, to ‘enhance palate texture and richness’. Pale lemon/green, it has a highly scented, slightly toasty bouquet. Medium-bodied, it is a distinctive, tangy wine, with a minerally streak and strong, lively, slightly sweet (11.5 grams/litre of residual sugar) flavours.” Michael Cooper
A few rows of own-rooted Riesling vines planted over forty years ago gave us the fruit for our first Riesling in 1991 and continue to provide the nucleus of this single vineyard, organic wine. Additional fruit comes from our ‘Road Block’ planted in 1996. These vines too are now mature. Selective hand harvest excludes any botrytis influence from this style. Whole bunch pressed, settled and tank fermented with selected, low vigour yeast. A slow fermentation is easily stopped at the point that remaining sugar and acid come into balance. A period of months in tank on yeast lees allows the palate to soften and build additional depth, as does time in bottle before release.
This wine is very much the product of a magnificently warm summer of sunshine punctuated by rainfall in late February, beginning a cooler, settled month leading into harvest. These conditions proved perfect for varietal flavour development. This Riesling is still very youthful in all respects. It shows complex aromas of limes, apples, white stone fruits and subtle savoury, minerals. The palate is defined by delicate citrus flavours, sweet hints of honey and toast notes. Texture is fine-grained and a ripe, piquant acidity provides mouthwatering succulence and energy. A few grams of retained sweetness (through stop-fermentation), has been key to the harmony within. It creates soft mouthfeel and smooth flow across the palate, deftly balancing and supressing any suggestion of austerity.