The Art of Blending

It is official, we are now moving to the third vintage of our very own ETM house wine.

After visiting Veneto and Dijon in pursuit of the perfect vintages we ended up in the excellent wine houses in Carcassonne (a really pretty medieval town in the heart of Languedoc). After a whole day sampling and trying to balance the characteristics of each single varietals, we happily signed off the final blends.

Our white wine is based on the Chardonnay grape. It has a naturally beautiful pure stone fruit character but was lacking a little in acidity and aromatics so we combined it with a lively refreshing Sauvignon along with Chasan (crossing of Chardonnay and Listan) to add some further floral notes.

We started the rosé tasting with a Syrah, which was rather spicy, but with the addition of a Grenache Noir the wine became softer in the middle palate, and topped with lovely refreshing wild strawberry notes.

Our red is mainly based on an extremely pleasant Merlot but on its own the length wasn't long enough, so we have added some Syrah and a touch of Grenache giving the wine more concentration and complexity.

The bottling process has already begun and the wines should arrive in all our pubs within the next month. I just hope our guests will enjoy as much as we did making it.