In 2012, Richard Kershaw MW, established Richard Kershaw Wines to create prototype wines from selected clones, site-specific, growing in a cold climate, from noble grapes, which produce world-class wines. South Africa's coolest wine-growing region, the Elgin Valley, is ideal as it benefits from higher altitude, proximity to the ocean with alternating cloud cover, high cold masses, and a diurnal range, allowing Chardonnay, Syrah and more recently Pinot Noir grapes to capture the identity of the terroir of the place.
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Moderate, with a powerful mineral element, classy in a word, with fruity notes, oat notes & beautiful complexity due to its stay in oak.
The grapes are picked by hand in the first mornings of autumn, placed in small crates, and transferred directly into whole bunches to a press, with a maximum of 0.6 bar or until 615 liters of juice per tonne are collected. The gravity of the juice flows directly into the barrel (no pumps are used) without settling. The unfermented juice is subjected to spontaneous fermentation until all the sugars are fermented. The wine is left in the barrel for 4 months before sulphurization and another 7 months after sulphurization before bottling.
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Barrels: A small number of barrels were carefully selected, all from Burgundy, only French oak. Importantly, each clone and soil type was micro-wined as a single batch. Each lot used an algorithm set up to keep data on which barrels performed best and how many new and how many used barrels were used. Overall, the average in 2018 was 39.4% new oak barrels. 82.2% of 228 liters and 17.8% of 500 liters.