'Neighbour's Fruit' Pét Nat 2023

Artwork

Kate Lewis painted the fruit basket full of oranges gifted to her by her neighbour during lockdown. The tree stretched over into Kate's backyard and the thoughtful neighbour passed the basket over the fence as a peace offering. We thought it was fitting to pair it with a wine made from fruit offered by equally friendly growers in a neighbouring wine region.

Winemaking

100% Heathcote Shiraz stomped to leach a little bit of the pink hue from the skins before pressing into old French oak barrels for fermentation. The fragrances coming out of the barrels during fermentation were fantastic - this could be the best iteration of the Neighbour's Fruit yet! Unfiltered, unfined, non-disgorged. 

Vineyard

Being a smaller, family-owned vineyard, a lot of care goes into canopy management. Practices such as shoot thinning are used to concentrate the vines’ energy into producing fewer, higher-quality bunches. Such techniques also minimise reliance on pesticides.

The vineyard lies on the east-facing side of the Mount Camel Range. The range was formed on a fault line with nutrient-rich, Cambrian-aged* metabasalts being forced to the surface. The mixing of these decomposed metabasalts with seafloor sediments (chert, jasper, siltstone etc.) provides the strikingly red, iron-rich, well-draining soil that makes this site so desirable. 

*The basaltic rock is referred to as being "Cambrian" as it was formed during the Cambrian period, approximately 485-540 million years ago