Thursday, 25 September, 2014
Laborie Estate
The 2010 vintage was the start of a significant stylistic and quality journey for Laborie MCC’s. This vintage had shown its form at the last years Veritas and Michelangelo International Wine Awards, picking up a silver and a gold respectively. The 2010 Blanc de Blanc vintage was also voted one of the top 6 MCC’s at the Classic Wine Awards, also in 2013.
Johann Fourie, Chief Winemaker at KWV, and his team, have re invented the wheel as far as their entire MCC winemaking process goes. Vineyard management and a wide choice of grape compo-nents, allied to a specific harvest strategy has enabled his team to achieve winning wine styles.
He also highlights some other winemaking best practices which have led to success. “We cool the grapes before processing, scrupulously sort the bunches for quality and manage the pH aspect carefully at pressing.”
The results are a cleaner, more fruit driven, elegant style with acid freshness and finesse.
Laborie winemaker, Kobus van der Merwe adds, “People love our Laborie Blanc de Blanc for many reasons. The refreshing fruit note is one of them, but also the fine mousse, which people seem to really appreciate and enjoy.”
For future vintages Marco Ventrella, Chief Viticulturalist, comments, “ Look, we made this MCC 4 years ago, and we’ve been learning a lot more about our vineyards, and how to adapt our wine-making to unlock the best quality since then. So as far as the follow-up vintages go, I guess it a matter of “watch this space!”.
The Amorim Cap Classique Challenge is the only competition committed exclusively to the Cap Classique category, and this was the 14th year South Africa’s producers of bottle-fermented spar-kling wine took part in this popular competition.
This year’s Amorim Cap Classique Challenge was judged by Alan Mullins, retailer Mark Norrish, Wayve Kolevsohn, sommelier at the Test Kitchen, consultant Winnie Bowman and wine writers Neil Pendock, Cathy Marston and Christian Eedes.