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Chateau Malaudos
A vineyard near Pezenas in the Languedoc, south France. Abandoned for four years, this is the story of its regeneration.
We've taken you through all our trials and tribulations over the last year, right up to a couple of weeks ago when our tiny quantity of wine had a stuck fermentation. But the addition of lees from Hans' finished wine kick-started ours, and within less than two weeks our malolactic fermentation was completed. We received the long-awaited -mail from the oenologue, then we had to take in a second sample for verification. My heart was racing as I opened her e-mail a day later. Confirmed. Hooray!
Now we had to take the wine off the lees, and add a tiny amount of sulfite to stop the wine oxidising. At this point we had the first taste of the finished wine. We'd been fully expecting cooking wine, and had prepared a cookery book of red wine recipes to go with it, but to our great surprise the wine actually tastes good.
I like it - enough to have a second and third glass. And to look forward to drinking it. After all we've gone through over the last year I can hardly believe it.
Anyway, enough boasting. Ali and I spent a day and a half manually filling and labelling a very limited edition of 364 bottles.
Of course we're using the wonderful Zorks instead of cork for the closures, and I can reveal the full set of labels.
364 bottles of very drinkable wine rescued from a hail-filled tornado. We're thrilled to bits.
We are thrilled to bits to announce that we are the very first vineyard in France to use a new type of wine bottle closure called the ZORK. Here's a picture of our bottles with ZORK recyclable plastic closures.
ZORK is a revolutionary wine closure with the convenience of screw cap and the pop of a cork. There are 15 billion wines bottled each year. Around 10% of wines bottled with cork are spoiled by the failure of the closure. ZORK is an alternative wine closure that has been developed in Australia to solve the global problems of cork taint and random oxidation.
