2007 The Noble Riesling - 375ml

© Roger Fletcher

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Harvest Dates:
11th & 12th May
Alcohol by Vol:
11.5%
Glucose + Fructose:
169.5 g/L
Titratable Acid:
10 g/L
pH:
3.40
Oak Maturation:
None
Bottling Date:
9 January 2008
Chief Winemaker:
Chester d’Arenberg Osborn
Senior Winemaker:
Jack Walton

Other Vintages

Early May 1985 saw d’Arenberg’s first ‘Noble’ attempt. The extraordinary coincidence of biological events and contradictions required to produce ‘Botrytis Cinerea’ mould occurred. The effect of ‘Botrytis Cinerea’ is to make the skin of the grapes porous and given the correct weather, shrivel. The shrivelled grapes are intensely sweet and full of character, producing wine with a wide array of fruits. A further two decades on, d’Arenberg has an enviable reputation for ‘sticky’ sweet dessert wines.

This is a lovely, flavoursome, Australian-style dessert wine. This year, the style suggests a cross between a rich Botrytis Cinerea effected style and an elegant, intense, late-picked wine due to its lovely aperitif edge that runs through the palate and onto the finish.
The wine is yellow-golden in appearance with perfumed aromas of Riesling florals, quince, dried mandarin and tangelo skins. There are also notes of passionfruit, white peach and nectarine to saturating your senses.
The palate is tight and mouth coating with ripe, exotic flavours dominated by peach and nectarine stones, white peach, dried mandarin peel, pineapple cubes and passionfruit characters. The wine has superb fruit concentration and sweetness balanced with fine lacy acidity that adds definition to the finish which is dominated with ripe, red and green apple notes and mineral notes.

Already great drinking and will age well over the next 5 to 10 years and as a wine style will offer a great versatility in serving options.

2007 was the earliest start for vintage ever, due to extreme drought conditions not seen for decades. Just as the vintage was to commence we experienced a 50mm rain which apart from saving the vintage created a lot of damage to a small number of our Riesling blocks. A moderate level of warmth returned in the following days we experienced a high level of berry splitting which offered the real possibility for late-picked sweet whites. After walking away from these blocks and returning in Autumn, the fruit looked shrivelled and dehydrated due to being naturally infected with Botrytis Cinerea.

As the grape skin is porous the grapes naturally dehydrated causing their sugar levels to increase to incredible levels. This is aided by the dew from cold, moist, autumn mornings follow by the warmth of a sunny day which further increases the rate of dehydration until everything is pinkie-brown and gooey.

Late harvesting took place by hand in small volumes when fruit flavours and the botrytis cinerea infections were at an optimal point.
The fruit is gently crushed then receives a small amount of skin contact in small tanks for a number of days then gently pressed off using our basket presses. Fermentation occurs in a number of small tanks using neutral yeast to cope with the high natural sugar levels and to avoid dominating the fruit characters.
The fermentation is stopped mid way through to retain the considerable level of residual sugars.