The Green Room Vineyard, a.k.a. the Grancari vineyard in the Onkaparinga Hills farmed by the Ochotas’ dear old friend, Rino, has always been the source of fruit for this wine and remains one of the great sites in the Ochota Barrels’ lineup. ‘The Green Room’ was created as an incubator of sorts for a wine ready for the ‘big stage.’ It’s also the place you want to be in the barrel of a wave (a nod to Taras and Ambers’ love for surfing). The 82-year-old certified organic vines are tucked in behind suburbia, and with an easy and lightly worked fermentation comes a youthful, fragrant, and bright wine.
The fruit was hand-harvested over two weeks in mid-late February. The fruit was fermented with ambient yeasts, with about 65% of the batch fermenting entirely whole-cluster. The fruit was all cold-soaked for five days until wild yeast fermentation kicked off. The ferments were gently foot stomped and after 8-12 days, the wine was basket-pressed to old French barriques for five months of aging then blended and settled in tank. It was bottled without fining and just a small sulfur addition and pad filtration.