Winemaking

Winemaking

Winemaking at Painted Rock is collaborative. Consultant Alain Sutre of Ertus Consulting in Bordeaux oversees the vineyard and winemaking team, lead locally by Gabriel Reis. At Painted Rock, there is a deep understanding that winemaking begins in the vineyard. We use only fruit grown on our single estate vineyard, and never comingle or purchase additional fruit. Through cropping and canopy management we methodically control the yield and ripening schedule to ensure consistency from vintage-to-vintage (see Our Vineyard for details).

Each vineyard block is individually hand picked and destemmed with individual berries sorted to ensure only flawless fruit is kept. From there the blocks are broken into small batch lots and each is fermented separately. Our red varieties are cold soaked on their skins for four days followed by a further 21 days on their skins in tank. Our chardonnay is cool fermented at 16 degrees. During fermentation pump overs take place twice daily until fermentation is complete. The resulting individual wines are placed into carefully selected barrels and routinely tasted over the following 18 months as they mature. The barrels that will be blended to create the Red Icon are chosen first for their specific attributes with single varietals of the component wines made in vintages that allow for it. Finally, the resulting wines are bottled without filtering to ensure a true expression of the variety.