We have extended our reserve range of wines with the release of the 2021 Castle Rock Estate ‘Diletti’ Pinot Noir, 2021 Castle Rock Estate ‘Diletti’ Riesling and 2020 Castle Rock Estate ‘Diletti’ Chardonnay.
The new Castle Rock Estate ‘Diletti’ Pinot Noir is a wine that showcases balanced integration of winemaking techniques with our premium, estate grown fruit.
This extremely limited wine is an alternative approach to our house style of Pinot Noir. It comprises 100 percent handpicked and whole bunch fermented grapes, creating lifted aromatics and a fine tannin structure. Nine months of maturation in old French barriques results in a highly aromatic wine with silky texture and amazing structure and length.
The 2020 Castle Rock Estate ‘Diletti’ Chardonnay is cool climate, complex Chardonnay, which has been barrel fermented in French oak, 20 percent of which was new.
Our Diletti wines are made to exhibit texture and complexity. This Chardonnay was enhanced by natural ferment, with some juice solids during fermentation and leaving the wine on yeast lees in barrel for 10 months.
The 2021 Castle Rock Estate ‘Diletti’ Riesling is a new addition to the winery’s Riesling stable. “It’s an exciting extension to our Rieslings. This wine is about texture and complexity built around the tight Riesling structure yet still displaying its Riesling DNA; free-run juice filled to puncheon and barriques prior to ferment with a different amount of juice solids (cloudy juice) in each barrel. We then matured the wine on lees in Barrels for nine months prior to bottling.”
The ‘Diletti’ wines are all sourced from estate grown grapes from the 55-hectare property that was initially planted in 1983. Porongurup is the smallest of the five sub-regions making up Australia’s largest wine growing region, the Great Southern. The subregion is 40 km north of Albany and encompasses the entire 12km long Porongurup Range, featuring luxuriant Karri forests and views of the Stirling Range to the north.
The easterly aspect of our vineyards, in our opinion, has turned out to be what makes our site so unique.
We get the early morning sun and not the hot afternoon sun, the prevailing wind in Summer is an easterly. In most of WA it is hot, but for us it comes off the bight, so is a cooling sea breeze, and although we are only 300m above sea level, the surrounding land is low and flat, so we believe that the way the easterly is uplifted as it hits the Porongurups is important too.