Gin Tonic 2019

I'm not much of a cocktail drinker, so I had to make a G&T of my own… And it become one of our signature wines. When the 2015 juice (our first edition of this wine) was fermenting, its aroma was super reminiscent of juniper berries and its slightly bitter aftertaste of tonic water. As a result, 1) everybody in the winery was constantly tasting it on barrel (I was afraid if there would even be some wine left for the outside world) 2) it earned “GinTonic” as a working title scribbled on the barrel–a name that has stuck with it ever since.

I remember a time when winemakers in our village used to say “if you don't have sauvignon blanc in your cellar, you ain't no winemaker” because everybody was trying to make a hardcore “nettle-y” wine from unripe pyrazine grapes, in order to wow visitors with an intensely aromatic white similar to the then-popular New World Savvys. All this at the expense of taste because–obviously–the prematurely picked grapes turned into wines that were quite... rickety. But I wanted something else, something rich and flavoursome. Like whole milk, straight from the cow.

The result was a wine that doesn't taste or smell like Sauvignon Blanc at all. Probably because I didn't try to assign any roles to it or shape it into some moulds; the only thing I cared about was encapsulating and transferring the energy from the barrel to the bottle.