Pewsey Vale 10 Year Museum Reserve The Contours Riesling

Pewsey Vale Contours Riesling Museum Release bottle image

Wine Description

Pewsey Vale Vineyard The Contours is characterised by a special site, sensitive vine growing and astute winemaking. The Contours Riesling is produced from old vines grown on the coolest slope within this ruggedly beautiful single vineyard. After 10 years in the bottle the 2007 Pewsey Vale Contours Riesling is showing all the poise and intensity that you would expect in a great bottle aged Riesling.

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Acclaim
“When these museum release wines waft past my olfactory gear, I'll often sit there pondering how lucky we are to have producers, in the current climate, who will hold wines back when the are hitting peak drinking. I salute you all. Straw in the glass with a swirl of complex aromas featuring drying hay, toasted brioche, Bickford's lime cordial, pressed citrus blossom, dried mushrooms, cultured butter, perhaps some curry leaf, crushed quartz and lemon barley further back. Still crystalline and focused despite all the toasty complexity, with a cadence and length that many would aspire to.” — James Halliday, Aug 2024
“Super fragrant, fresh and attractive lemon and lemon-peel aromas here, gently glazed by a six-year rest in bottle. Some crushed stones and white flowers, too. The palate has really attractive, pithy intensity with pickled-lime flavors holding fresh, deep and long. Nicely complex now and more toasty development to come in the next decade.”
— James Suckling, Aug 2020
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Vineyard & Production Info
Vineyard name
Pewsey Vale Vineyard
Soil composition
grey sandy loam
Elevation:
1,500 feet
Average Vine Age:
42
Certifying Organizations:
ISO14001; Entwine Australia
Sustainability Certification:
EPA Acredited Sustainability Licence
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Winemaking & Aging
Prefermentation Technique:
1-4 days on solids before wild yeast start to ferment
Varietal composition:
100% Riesling
Fermentation container:
Stainless steel tanks
Malolactic fermentation:
no
Fining agent:
Vegan
Type of aging container:
bottle
Length of bottle aging:
10 years
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Analytical Data
Alcohol:
13 %
Residual sugar:
0.7 g/L
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Wine Production

Sealing a bottle under a screw cap removes the variability and taints associated with cork. A screw cap also ensures that the wine in the bottle will age under the best possible conditions. The perfect seal of the screw cap ensures that no air or oxygen can enter the bottle. In these reductive conditions the wine undergoes "pure bottle aging" where the fresh citrus flavors remain, and are overlaid with flavors of toast, lemon grass and eventually some honey and possibly marmalade. Since there is no oxygen getting in to the bottle, there is no oxidising or "drying out" of the wine. This means that the colour, while it will deepen into the gold spectrum, retains its freshness and green hues and does not go brown, and that the flavors and palate do not "dry out",but stay fresh with any sweet fruit characters that were initially in the wine remaining.

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About the Vineyard

Rainfall in Eden Valley during the growing season was less than forty percent of average, this combined with low crop set and slightly higher than average temperatures, caused the grapes to ripen nearly a month earlier than normal. Despite these trials, the quality of the fruit was excellent, and the resultant wines full of limes and citrus flavours with lovely long mineral acidity.