12 Wines of Christmas...Wine #3 revealed

The 3rd wine of our 12 Wines of Christmas is our 2020 Tragically Vidal. Get in the spirit & enjoy making Christmas cookies while sipping on some Vidal - check out Erin's recipe for Tilly's Butter Cake Bites below. Cheers!

Vidal is always one of the last grapes to come in each year. We’ve found, over the 25 years of working with it, that waiting until just after the first frost to pick seems to be Vidal’s sweet spot. The grape’s tough skins finally soften enough that we are able to maximize flavour and aromatic expression, and there is a slight raisining that happens in certain pockets of the vineyard, that contribute to that beautiful honeyed bouquet. This year, the Vidal was so powerfully aromatic that we decided to blend in less Orange Muscat than usual. We also included a small amount of skin-fermented Vidal to boost textural complexity on the palate.

Our Estate-grown Vidal was destemmed, lightly crushed, and gravity transferred to membrane press, where the juice was gently pressed and pumped into tank. After settling for 48 hrs, the clarified juice was racked and transferred into another stainless steel tank before being inoculated with a select yeast culture. It enjoyed a long, slow, cool ferment, preserving as much of the aromatics as possible, before being arrested prior to sugar dryness by chilling the wine to 0°C. As we have come to do over the last few vintages of Tragically Vidal, we blended a small portion of our Orange Muscat into it, further boosting the aromatics, and giving the wine a slightly more floral direction.

Varietals: 98.7% Vidal, 1.3% Orange Muscat
Alcohol: 12.3% alc./vol.
Residual Sugar: 14.5 g/L
Total Acidity: 7.4 g/L
pH: 3.15
Harvest Dates: Oct 2020
Bottling Date: Feb 2021
Release Date: April 2021