Offbeat Wines - Daniel & Nicola Ham
England, Southwest, Wiltshire
The latest release from Dan & Nic at Offbeat is here: introducing Field Notes 1.
The first instalment of Field Notes is the by-product of their experimentations with maceration techniques and ageing, a supple and pretty blend of Pinots Noir & Blanc from a plot on clay soils in Crouch Valley, Essex.
Whole bunch Pinot Noir is suspended in a tank of direct-pressed Pinot Blanc juice, sealed for a gentle three week infusion, with the free run juice split between an Acacia Barrel, a fifth-fill Burgundy barrel, and a small glass carboy to age outside. After 11 months, the three were blended together and bottled via gravity with no additions.
(The press-juice of the Pinot Noir made it into the blend for an upcoming Field Notes 2- more news on that in a few weeks!)
We caught up with Dan this morning as he was washing apples for a couple of orchard blend pet-nat cider experiments, to discuss how Field Notes 1 came to life:
"Before harvest last year I'd been reading about this take on a carbonic maceration, and decided to give it a go. When I knew I was getting fruit from this plot of Pinot Blanc & Pinot Noir and I didn't want to do the usual direct-press white, macerated red, this was the technique I thought I could try.
It's proven itself to be a real lifesaver technique actually, and I've used it again for 2021. Because amidst the madness of harvest when you're completely knackered, you know you can just fill up a tank, top it up with juice, seal it away- and it's safe, it's not going to develop volatile acidity. It's a lovely gentle extraction, and you have so much control over it. It leads to really pretty wines.
When we tasted it after three weeks, it was so aromatic that I thought it would work well in the 400L acacia barrel. It's a funny wood to work with, it can really clash with some wines, but worked beautifully here. The rest went into the neutral Burgundy barrel, and then one of my carboys outside. These Rancio-style outdoor experiments have been interesting, the whites more-so on their own than this red, but it blended back in really nicely.
Techniques like this maceration have really helped us define our approach here, like a slow-cooking style of winemaking. This year in particular, our presses on the whites are all 12 to 14 hours, we're doing lots of extended carbonic macerations. I'm really trying to slow down the processing where I can. You take nine months of work -all this beautiful fruit- and you can really race through it when processing at the end. I'm keen to take our time, let things rest, and try and maintain a little of that slower energy."
NOW AVAILABLE
2020 - Field Notes 1 - Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc
