We are excited to announce that both St Florence 2019: Gamay- Ravensworth and St Florence 2019: Gamay- Swinging Bridge will be available at our cellar door and online at 2pm (Sydney time) on Friday 6 March 2020.
These two beers are the result of two very small test batches of Gamay wine grape refermentations from harvest last year. If you have a peek in my cellar, you would quickly realise that my love for this grape runs deep. For me, it strikes this great balance between fruit, acid and tannin structure that makes the produce of Beaujolais some of the tastiest liquids on the planet. Oh, and also I cant afford to drink Burgundy... lets be real.
Anyway, playing with Gamay with our St Florence wine refermentation beers has been a dream for me for a good while, but sourcing the fruit is pretty tough. Its not very widely grown here in Australia and where it is, its generally turned into cult-status wine like the Sorrenburg cuvee. Gosh I should not be telling any more people about this stuff or its gonna get harder and harder to find. But in 2019, I asked my friend Bryan Martin of Ravensworth Wines in Murrumbateman very very nicely if he would be willing to part with just 60kg of fruit for my little ferment... well I got doubly lucky because not only did he agree, he also tipped me off that Tom Ward of Swinging Bridge wines in Orange NSW might have some as well. Well you can imagine that it took no time at all for me to ring Tom and pay a visit on my next trip to Orange where he very kindly agreed to let me pick a similar volume to test these two Gamay beers side-by-side.
We made these two blends in a similar fashion to all of our wine-grape refermentation beers by starting with hand harvested whole bunch fruit and placing them in a carbonic maceration in tank for a number of weeks. This is a quintessential Beaujolais technique and thus very at home with this grape. We then chose and blended together two barrels of mature, barrel aged Gold: 1770- 7 months old and 1703- 10 months old, in order to get a consistent base aged beer for both cuvees. An equal volume was transferred onto each vat of grapes for a multi-monthlong maceration and refermentation. They are meant to be enjoyed as a pair in this way.
The two beers show quite different sided of the grape with the Orange fruit more perfume and a touch more fleshy from Murrumbateman. They both enjoy a stunning colour and prove that in this case... the reality of making beer with this glorious fruit is even better than the dream.
As these are small, test batches, we have have around 280x375ml of each beer and thus outside of special events and festivals, they will not be available outside out cellar door and online shop with a limit of 4 bottles per person.
Like all our beers, these two are best enjoyed when decanted off a settled natural yeast sediment at cellar temperatures (10-12°C).
