Pewsey Vale 10 Year Museum Reserve The Contours Riesling

Pewsey Vale Contours Riesling Museum Release bottle image

Wine Description

Pewsey Vale Vineyard The Contours is characterised by a special site, sensitive vine growing and astute winemaking. The Contours Riesling is produced from old vines grown on the coolest slope within this ruggedly beautiful single vineyard. After 10 years in the bottle the 2007 Pewsey Vale Contours Riesling is showing all the poise and intensity that you would expect in a great bottle aged Riesling.

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Acclaim
“Pale chartreuse. A complex, finely etched bouquet evokes mineral-accented citrus and orchard fruits, along with suave jasmine and candied ginger notes. A deeper pit fruit quality emerges with air and carries onto the palate, which features juicy Meyer lemon and bitter pear skin flavors and a bitter quinine flourish. Shows impressive tension on the finish, which hangs on with outstanding focus and minerally persistence. For my money, this is about as good as New World Riesling gets, vintage in and vintage out. At the price, it's an absolute steal.”
— Vinous, Sep 2022
“The fruit for this 2015 The Contours Museum Reserve Riesling was picked from the Contours vineyard in the Eden Valley. The Eden is elevated above the Barossa Valley, at an elevation of over 440 meters. The skeletal, podzolic soils veritably burst forth with rocks—quartz and granite—among the old, towering gums that sway in the wind... there's something incredibly evocative about the Eden Valley. With all of this in mind, at seven years of age today in 2022, this wine is spicy and enveloping but absolutely remains shackled to the rails of acidity and tension that this region is so good at. At no point through the finish does the fruit waver or deviate from the set path, telling us it has plenty of time left to go yet. This wine is routinely impressive, and so too is this release.”
— Wine Advocate, Aug 2022
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Vineyard & Production Info
Vineyard name
Pewsey Vale Vineyard
Soil composition
grey sandy loam
Elevation:
1,500 feet
Average Vine Age:
42
Certifying Organizations:
ISO14001; Entwine Australia
Sustainability Certification:
EPA Acredited Sustainability Licence
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Winemaking & Aging
Prefermentation Technique:
1-4 days on solids before wild yeast start to ferment
Varietal composition:
100% Riesling
Fermentation container:
Stainless steel tanks
Malolactic fermentation:
no
Fining agent:
Vegan
Type of aging container:
bottle
Length of bottle aging:
10 years
Total SO2
52
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Analytical Data
pH level:
2.99
Acidity:
6.07 g/L
Alcohol:
12.5 %
Total SO2
52
Residual sugar:
0.7 g/L
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Wine Production

Sealing a bottle under a screw cap removes the variability and taints associated with cork. A screw cap also ensures that the wine in the bottle will age under the best possible conditions. The perfect seal of the screw cap ensures that no air or oxygen can enter the bottle. In these reductive conditions the wine undergoes "pure bottle aging" where the fresh citrus flavors remain, and are overlaid with flavors of toast, lemon grass and eventually some honey and possibly marmalade. Since there is no oxygen getting in to the bottle, there is no oxidising or "drying out" of the wine. This means that the colour, while it will deepen into the gold spectrum, retains its freshness and green hues and does not go brown, and that the flavors and palate do not "dry out",but stay fresh with any sweet fruit characters that were initially in the wine remaining.

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About the Vineyard

Rainfall in Eden Valley during the growing season was less than forty percent of average, this combined with low crop set and slightly higher than average temperatures, caused the grapes to ripen nearly a month earlier than normal. Despite these trials, the quality of the fruit was excellent, and the resultant wines full of limes and citrus flavours with lovely long mineral acidity.