Description
Wine Details
Alcohol Grade: 12.5%
Aging/ Vinification: The reds were whole-cluster pressed, and the whites were soaked on skins overnight. Fermentation was carried out in stainless steel tank. At 10g/l of sugar, the wine is chilled, settled, and racked. Alex bottles the wine in early spring with as little sediment as possible. It ferments dry in the bottle resulting in lightly sparkling wine.
Best to have it: 8-10ºC. This wine is very ALIVE. Chill the wine upright. Clean the outside of the bottle after removing from the refrigerator. Very slowly lift the crown cap while holding the entire bottle of wine vertically over the glass. Do not entirely remove the crown cap from the bottle, just enough to hear a hiss. Let the carbonation slowly emit out and go into the glass.
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.
