This Pride of the Fleurieu Cabernet was grown on Tony Brooks’ and Professor Barbara Santich’s dry-grown Stranger’s Reach Vineyard on the Fleurieu Penninsula overlooking the Finniss River wetlands. This block is cooled by the Great Southern Ocean and Lake Alexandrina where low rainfall and deep alluvial soils encourage Cabernet to ‘populate or perish’. The motif here is always generous fruit and structured tannin in perfect harmony.
Selected bunches were hand picked by family and friends in the third week of April (about 20 days later than in 2020) and gently crushed into open top fermenters. After 8 days of fermentation, the wine was then basket pressed into some new but predominately older French Oak Barriques for 18 months maturation and then bottled without filtration or fining and a reasonable dosage of sulfur.