2015 KENNETH GREEN VINTAGE FORTIFIED

THE STORY

The Kenneth Green Vintage Fortified is a vintage fortified style wine commemorating Kenneth Green, Josh Davenport’s Grandfather. Kenneth married Nancy, the last of the Myatts here is Australia. He was an English Gentleman he loved his cricket, he loved his claret and both those legacies were passed on to Josh.

TASTING NOTES

The first thing you’ll notice about this wine is the lovely lifted aromatics. It has a unique, orange peel, orange rind aromatic which is typical of the Touriga Nacional grape.

This is not a typical Australian red fortified style, and the palate has a very distinct Portuguese influence. It’s not sickly sweet and is quite dry, silky and textured.

As a young wine you can see plenty of soft, plush, rich fruit characters but in the long term you’ll see a lot more aromatics develop you’ll see a lot more elegance, and the flavours will increase in complexity.

Being a slightly drier style of fortified, this wine is really well suited to dried fruit and complex cheeses.

This style of wine is world renowned for its longevity and recommended cellaring for this wine is basically as long as you can hold it. 30 years+ is not unusual for a vintage port style.

We use very traditional techniques and very traditional grape varieties in making this wine.

Touriga Nacional, the classic portuguese port grape is grown in our Carmel Valley vineyard and is the primary source of fruit for this wine. Smaller portions of Shiraz and Durif are also added for richness, colour and texture

We pick the Touriga National at quite a moderate baumé but the Durif and Shiraz come off at very high baumé. They’re typically shrivelled or raisin berries and in traditional portuguese style, fruit for this wine is foot stomped. It’s a terrible job because the fruit is chilled first and at 5º it doesn’t take long for the whole lower half of your body to go numb.

The period of fermentation is quite a short one because we want to retain a lot of the natural sugars and fermentation consists of 4 or 5 days fermentation on skins.

We fortify with a mixed spirit, it’s a 30% brandied spirit with a 70% SVR or neutral spirit. We do this to get some complexity from the brandy spirit but the neutral spirit helps to keep the purity of fruit flavour.

The wine doesn’t see a long time in oak, only 6 months before bottling. This is so it can do all its growing up in bottle.