Marlborough, March 2007 – The “Sauvalanche” began for Nautilus Estate in Marlborough on the 21^st March 2007.

 

Nautilus was one of the first in the region to begin picking grapes on 7^th March for its sparkling wines, but as you can see from the photo, things have now begun in earnest with a bleary-eyed nightshift crew loading the last Sauvignon Blanc of the night into the locally designed Taylor’s Tipping Tanks as the sun comes up.

 

This is only the second time fruit has been received at Nautilus’ specially built white winery – last year was a little frantic as equipment was still arriving right up until the first press-load as the season was two weeks early. This year things are a little calmer.

 

“We really know what we are doing now” says Cellar Supervisor, Brett Bermingham, “we’ve got an awesome winery here. Last year everything was brand new and we had to spend some time fine tuning our work flows, but this year we are really making the most of the fantastic facilities that we have.”

 

Nautilus Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc is machine harvested in the cool of the night to get the fruit into the winery as quickly as possible – preserving the intense aromatic properties that make Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc famous around the world. After an hour and a half sitting on skins to encourage the uptake of aromatic compounds such as thiols, the free run juice is drained off into one of the fully insulated tanks in the winery for fermentation with a specially selected yeast.

 

Winemaker Clive Jones says “The flavours this year are looking great – the warm period we had a couple of weeks ago has really developed the ripeness of the fruit and we are getting superb complexity and concentration now. It’s looking like being a great season”.