The decision in 2019 to graft over an acre of vines in the Bannockburn vineyard to Gamay took time. Matt Holmes and his team considered a wide variety of choices before Gamay became the first new variety to be introduced on the property since 1980. The 1.4-acre plot lies below the Olive Tree Hill Pinot Noir vines and down the slope from the S.R.H. vines on limestone with clay subsoils. It’s a site that gets a lot of warmth, with strong afternoon sun in warmer years. In the cooler years, the team must manage the canopy to ensure ripeness is achieved.
Gamay has a reputation for being tricky to work with. Perhaps this is one reason why so little is seen outside of Beaujolais. To earn his spurs, Holmes travelled to France to work vintage with Grégoire Hoppenot in Fleurie. He picked up a few pointers, not least the reinforcement that Gamay’s most authentic expression comes down to terroir—something Bannockburn has in spades. Hand-picked fruit fermented spontaneously using whole-bunch carbonic maceration, then taken off the stems and pressed to a single-use barrique to finish fermentation. The wine rested in barrel for 10 months before bottling. As in 2022, just one barrel was made in 2023. The team are planting more Gamay vines, so we can hopefully look forward to larger allocations in the future. For now, this second release is a pearler.