Gamay is on the rise in Australia, particularly in the Adelaide Hills. The fruit comes from Sam’s Eureka Vineyard in Woodside, an old gold mine with lots of quartz. After extensive work in the vineyard with a focus on reducing yields, Louis and Hannah were able to make a wine that shows tremendous concentration and complexity in a medium bodied frame. ‘Blue Eyes’ refers to Louis and Hannah’s daughter, Zoe, who was born in 2020 with blue eyes, despite neither of her parents having them. They have an electric brightness that lights up your mood just like this ethereally beautiful Gamay.
From vines planted in the early 2000s and regrafted in 2018, the Gamay is brought into the cellar to ferment spontaneously open-top fermenters. The fermentation regime is all over the map for this wine: the 2021 vintage was entirely de-stemmed, 2022’s regime was a mix of whole bunch, de-stemmed, and extended carbonic maceration, and now in 2023, Louis went 100% whole-cluster. The wine spent 13 days on its skins before being pressed off to neutral oak before where it rested for 8 months. It was then bottled without fining or filtering, and just a small sulfur addition.