Description
Wine Details
Otono is Kindeli’s ‘autumn’ white blend, featuring Gewurztraminer, Riesling and a lesser amount of Pinot Gris. Everything is done the natural way, Alex watching carefully to make sure a clean and delicious textural white wine makes it out the other side.
Alcohol Grade: 13%
Aging/ Vinification: Gewurztraminer was fermented on skins for five days in amphora. After pressing, Riesling and Pinot Gris juice is added to the spent skins for a day. The wines are all blended together and age in amphora for several months before being bottled, unfined, unfiltered, and without sulphur.
Best to have it: 10-12ºC. Uncork an hour or two before enjoying to let this wine open up so you can get the most out of it. Serve chilled.
Size: 750ml
The Winery: Kindeli Wines
Based in Upper Moutere, on the north west of the South Island of New Zealand, Alex Craighead has a small cellar where we craft zero additive wines from 10 different varieties. They currently farm 11 hectares of grapes across 4 vineyards (a combination of owned and leased), with soil types ranging from clay, to gravel and silt.
In the winery Alex is a stickler for cleanliness. He won’t even allow you to bring wine glasses from their house into the winery for fear that a rogue malicious microorganism like brettanomyces will infest the place.
Alex makes wines with winemaking partner Josefina Ventrino, under two different labels; Don (Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris made with low intervention and minimal additions) and Kindeli (blended wines made from organic fruit and zero added sulphur).
The finished wines are bottled exclusively by gravity (using a wickedly archaic contraption) and are corked by hand. In 2017 he converted to Noma Corks which are made from recycled bits of sugarcane. They are carbon neutral and can’t be infected with TCA or other spoilage aromas. He doesn’t add any SO2 to the wines and they are not fined nor filtered.
