White Boar 2005
Tasting Notes
With a terrific depth of colour at odds with the Amarones that inspired the style, the White Boar has a nose of raisined fruit, chocolate, sweet dark fruits (plums) and an almost pinot-like gaminess and earthiness. The palate is full, even and soft and extremely long and layered. The plushness of the fruit is interspersed with the layers of flavours that seem constantly to evolve in the glass.
Vintage
An ideal lead up to vintage 2005 was had at Edgehill Vineyard: good winter rains with cool temperatures preceded a perfectly timed spring rain prior to flowering. Budburst occurred at its usual time (mid – late August), followed by a slightly earlier flowering than normally experienced. In the lead up to vintage there was a very even ripening period with few temperature extremes which resulted in the vines photosynthesising longer each day, bringing vintage forward by at least a couple of weeks. 2005 was almost a textbook vintage with excellent quality grapes resulting from what in hindsight was a very cool summer (reminiscent of 2002) with minimal temperature extremes.
Winemaking
Though inspired by the ‘Amarone’ wines from Valpolicella, ‘White Boar’ is a different beast altogether. Rather than harvesting the grapes and drying them on racks, the canes are cut once the desired flavour spectrum has developed, which allows the fruit to dry and then raisin on the vine. After approximately two weeks of this process, the grapes are hand picked before being gently guided through a slow fermentation. These vine concentrated wines are made as a blending component for the single vineyard Battle of Bosworth red wines, but fortunately in 2005 we had enough for this small bottling of the ‘White Boar.’
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Technical Details
Picking Date: 19th and 24th March 2005
pH Level: 3.7
Total Acidity: 5.22g/L
Alc/Vol: 15.0%
Bottling Date: 9th March 2007