As I write this on Monday the 4th of April, not only did we finish picking over a week ago but we’re also putting our first 2022 wine to bottle in the morning. Whoa, did that go fast or what!? Maybe it was the fact that as winemakers, we were all on baited breath as we watched Omicron rip through New Zealand, not sure if we were even going to be able to be present at certain, critical, times.

But as it turns out, Mother Nature had something else in mind for our late summer and early autumn as we headed into picking. Not only did it cool down but the rains came as well. Thankfully I had chosen to produce lots of ‘Nouveau’, which meant early picking and fruity ferments. This is not the year to make those big, luscious, silky reds. But I do believe there will be some great parcels of Hawke’s Bay Chardonnay and I’m very confident our Te Awanga fruit is great enough to make Testify this year.

But that will definitely be the only Testify wine from 2022. It’s called Testify for a reason. It is my hand on heart best effort and, well, the rest just wasn’t up to scratch this year. I hate to pull back the curtain too much. But the truth is in a great year, a winemaker
thinks certain parcels and ferments have a chance to make their top wines or reserve wines. Then as the wine progresses to bottle, whether in barrel or tank, we monitor to see if it lives up to our hopes and dreams. But in a year like this, when there are so likely to be issues in the vineyard, we know straight away that we are not making our top tier wines. Any winemaker who tells you otherwise is full of it! Though we won’t be making our Testify Red or Testify Pinot Noir in 2022, we harvested some beautiful fruit to make delicious 2022 additions to the Giunta and Decibel series.

But back to the exciting bit about tomorrow morning’s bottling. After some experimentation back in 2011 with this style and watching the world gravitate towards the trend over the past 10-11 years, we will be making a Decibel Petulant Pét-Nat (Pétillant Naturel). I have had requests for years to make this wine and finally I’ve found a way to make it work. Most important to me was to make a quality wine that was also certified organic.

There is lots of information out there on this style of wine (use yer Google folks). But to keep it simple here, it’s a fun, bubbly, young, naturally sparkling wine and in our case is certified organic as well. We’re making it from arguably Hawke’s Bay’s greatest varietal, Chardonnay, and sending this out to the world. We expect to sell this wine directly to you through our website and Bandwagon subscribers as well as folks in South Korea, USA, Australia, Quebec and Japan. And get ready for one of Rakai Kairatiana’s most interesting labels yet! Because yeah, Pet Nat is funky and we’re gonna go that way with it, label and all. We hope this will finish it’s ferment in bottle in the next few months and be ready to celebrate with you all in the spring. Watch this space.

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