Our second art wine! The unique charm and beauty of our island bottled...
This, our 2nd art wine project, is a collaboration with the lovely Danish artist Kirsa Andreasen. Kirsa spent some weeks at the island and our estate during the latter part of the harvest in 2023 and we made this wine inspired by her style in general and also from first talks about the piece she would make for us to adorn this special wine; the "Muse of Biniali".
We quickly decided together that this wine needed to be a rosé, but a unique kind of rosé with a certain depth and soul to match her artwork. So after a lot of tasting and creative out-of-the-box thinking we decided on a blend of Grenache and Manto Negro.
This vintage we had decided to make 2 very different fermentation of our Grenache rosé. One fermented spontaneously, and one with cultured yeast added and oh-my did they come out differently! One was deep, soulful and with a very intriguing personality and the other fruity, fresh and lively. So for the artwine we decided to use both in order to match the multi-layered personality of Kirsa's piece. One one side "cute" and innocently naive and on the other much deeper and complex.
The final blend ended with a third of the soulful spontaneously fermented Grenache and 2/3's of the fruity fresh Grenache fermented with cultured yeast. This was then given further depth and complexity by adding 25% of very round, lush and enticing Manto Negro.
But even then we weren't completely satisfied with the wine and needed more complexity and layers for it to match the painting! So we started playing around with an oak barrel, and not just any oak barrel! We had this incredible 500L Taransaud "Pure" from 2022, a very "fruit-respecting" and elegant type of barrel. Perfect for this rosé!
To only give the wine a "kiss" of oak to add further complexity and roundness we used only this one barrel of 500L = 1/3 of the total volume of the wine, and only let the wine rest in there for 5 months. The initial idea was actually only 3-4 months, but when tasting it just before Christmas we decided to give it a bit more time in there as it really developed beautifully.
Finally the 500L from the barrel was married with the 1000L in the stainless steel tank and voila! The PERFECT rosé for "Muse of Binali" was born and matches Kirsa's beautiful painting so so well!