Join The Allotment to purchase this wine for $35 a bottle.
An incredibly sentimental release, this is the last wine made from the Noetzli family vineyard in Maraekakaho, Hawke’s Bay, where Three Fates began. A magical hillside site where the sun, slope, and vine unite to produce wines of exceptional power and grace. It was a gift to work with this fruit for the four years we did.
A rocky start to spring left the vines with very few bunches, but a stunning summer ensured they ripened to perfection - yielding an eye-wateringly small crop of extremely flavourful berries, like tiny baubles of gold.
On a sun-filled morning in mid-March 2024, our friends and family helped pick a mere 600kg of Albariño. The precious cargo was rushed across the region to our winery in Eskdale, where Holly and Hester foot-stomped the bunches under Casey’s watchful eye. This stomping breaks the skins open, allowing spilt juices and split skins to mingle, encouraging early extraction of flavour - we needed every ounce of juice we could get! Twelve or so hours later, the fruit was pressed, settled, and put into barrels for a natural fermentation to occur. Little else was done along the way, other than bottling it up for you to enjoy at home.
We’ve held this in bottle for a whole year before release - partly because we wanted to wait until the flavours began to unspool and show their richness (a process which, like all things winemaking, takes time), and partly because we had so little and enjoyed it so much that we were sad to say goodbye. But it’s time to share this with you: the ultimate Three Fates Noetzli Vineyard Albariño, in all its glory.
Unfiltered and unfettered, this wine has a slight haze which makes it positively glow in sunlight. Nectarine, mandarin, lemon, and jasmine aromas burst forth from the glass - if we could bottle this for perfume, we would! The flavours are a heady tug-of-war between the bright, salty citrus acidity and the fuzzy texture of peaches and cream. We love to enjoy this wine in the sunshine, in good company, and with oysters whenever we get the opportunity! Though a pack of salt and vinegar crisps does well in a pinch…
Here’s what the wonderful Stephen Wong MW of The Real Review has to say about this wine: Delicate aromas of orange sherbet and cinnamon lift from the glass alongside complex notes of honeysuckle and kohlrabi. The palate is tart and tightly woven with flavours of seed spice, salted green mango and crunchy nectarine, neatly trimmed in savoury phenolics right to the dry finish. Compact, linear and very driven, this deliciously mouth-watering wine will unfurl in the coming years, gaining more honeyed, toasty complexity as it develops. 93 Points!
ALC: 13.5%
Contains sulphites
