Snakes & Ladders 2020

Thorne & Daughters, teknisk ark/fact sheet (thorneanddaughters.com – linket fra thorneanddaughters.com, hentet 2026-10-18): 2020 Thorne & Daughters Snakes & Ladders – område: Citrusdal Mountain; druer: Sauvignon Blanc; alkohol 13.6%. Producentens noter (engelsk): About the wine: THE WINE Little of the season’s rain reached our Skurfberg Sauvignon blanc vineyard in the 2020 growing season, so we were still dealing with a very dry growing season up there. That said, it seems the timing of the rain was able to help support a very healthy canopy of leaves on the vineyard, and the dryness provides a good limit on the natural vigour of the Sauvignon blanc vines. This vineyard never seems to fail to deliver wildly concentrated fruit, and it’s hard to contain the excitement we all feel when this makes it into the cellar. It’s a difficult pick as we need to balance the big fruit ripeness we get from the less vigorous part of the block with the pungent green-ness that we get from the more vigorous vines. That being said, I think we walked the knife-edge of ripeness well during the 2020 season and delivered some great wines. This is a vineyard of compulsion for me as I just couldn’t turn down the opportunity to work with grapes from this area. I’m continually delighted to see the kind of complexity and texture that Sauvignon blanc can deliver on the right sites. Our key focus during harvest is picking times. If we can pick grapes at the right time, we can achieve tension and ripeness in the wine without the need to manipulate and “dress-up” the wines. We have stuck to our winemaking basics here, eschewing primary fruit in favour of the deeper characteristics of the wines. The grapes are whole-bunch pressed in our old Vaslin basket press with no SOz or other additions. The juice is then wild-fermented in a mix of 225 litre old oak barrels where the wines remain on their gross lees for 9-10 months before blending and bottling. We favour malolactic fermentation over early additions of sulphur dioxide, and the wines only see a first addition of SO2 in the early winter. We are looking for wines that show tension without losing their suppleness and core, and wines that will reward time in the cellar. THorne & DaucHuHrTerRs hello@thorneanddaughters.com * www.thorneanddaughters.com RAISING OUR HANDCRAFTED WINES ALONG WITH OUR Two DAUGHTERS