“Could you ever need me,
And would you know how?”
Christie McVie (1979)
And there begins Tusk, Fleetwood Mac’s epic follow up to their epic album Rumours. After that album blew up the entire planet with its undeniable and enduring awesomeness, only a band of intergalactic genius would kick off the follow up with an introspective ballad like ‘Over & Over.’ What a track and what a false dawn, as the next track ‘The Ledge’ blows the collective Fleetwood Mac fan hive band into smithereens with its overt weirdness and foreshadows the fact that nothing about ‘the Mac’ will ever be the same again. What an important moment in music history, the band that helped create the sound of smooth LA cool announces its end, with Roxy Music’s Avalon to come as a fitting epitaph in 1982. For this reason, ‘Over & Over’ signifies the ability to break with the past, transcend expectation and convention, to redefine yourself, and to be thoroughly awesome all at the same time. This is a delicious drop from the high elevation of the Eminence VIneyard on the Whitlands Plateau (850m). Hyper cool climate from the site that brings us the Mt Midoriyama Chevaucher L’eclair Pet Nat and the MK Rose, this wine shares the cool climate benefits that these wines enjoy too. Lovely tannin, underlying berry flavors and a heap of spice.
The fruit was picked on the 5th of April. It was destemmed, very lightly crushed, and soaked on skins at 4C for 4 days with two light daily plunges. The juice was left to warm for natural fermentation at 22C for 3 weeks. Pressed long and slow in the final stages of ferment and left to finish and settle before being racked off gross lees and transferred to 95% old French oak and 5% new Hungarian oak hogshead. Bottled unfined and unfiltered with a touch of sulphur.
