Robert Oatley Sauvignon Blanc

Region Margaret River 70%  and Pemberton 30%

Winemakers James Manners, Trent Nankivell and Rebecca Kidd

Vintage 2008

 “Our wines reflect both a proud winemaking heritage and contemporary, innovative Australian wine styles - crafted and bottled at the family estate in Mudgee, Australia. I hope you enjoy drinking these wines as much as we enjoyed making them.” Robert Oatley

We travel to the West for Sauvignon Blanc, combining two outstanding regions in Margaret River and Pemberton, for this delightfully zesty, tropical flavoured white that is devoid of any oak influence.

Region
Western Australia is fast becoming the nation’s spiritual home for the popular Sauvignon Blanc grape with Margaret River and Pemberton the premier appellations. They share a Mediterranean climate but differ in temperature: the warmer Margaret River delivering generous tropical fruit notes whilst the cooler and Southern Ocean-influenced Pemberton component adds zest and backbone to the blend.

Vintage
2008 was a near-perfect year for Western Australian Sauvignon Blanc. Margaret River’s typically stable grape growing environment enjoyed ideal pre-vintage conditions and the grapes from the Amadeus vineyard were harvested at optimum ripeness. Pemberton’s growing season was one of the best in recent history, with the Channybearup vineyard enjoying perfect ripening conditions and ideal development of tropical fruit flavours rather than Sauvignon’s often dominant grassy notes.

Winemaking
A number of different parcels of grapes were harvested at ideal ripeness, in the cool of the night. The winemaker’s job here is to simply capture the juicy fruit characters of the grape so there are few winemaking tricks employed – it’s simply cool-fermented in stainless steel, racked and some portions were left on light lees to add structure, texture and additional palate weight. Whilst crushed and fermented in the West, the wine was matured and bottled at the family estate in Mudgee.

Cellar: Up to 3 years

Analysis
ALC/VOL: 13.0%
RS: 0.6g/litre
pH: 3.33
TA: 6.50g/litre