2021 Frankland Estate Isolation Ridge Riesling

Frankland Estate Isolation Ridge Riesling is 100% from the family’s certified-organic vineyard in Frankland River.
The 2021 harvest will be remembered for the perfect spring conditions leading into the ripening period. With the return to a “normal” picking date (starting on 19^th March), we harvested excellent white grapes – gratefully accepting generous cropping levels after two small vintages in 2019 and 2020. With bunch sizes and volumes back to normal levels we saw ripening slowly evolve and build some wonderful fruit flavour and concentration. Thus it’s a very exciting release.
With the vines now 33 years old and with our 13^th certified-organic vintage under our belt, we continue to see the subtle evolution of Isolation Ridge Vineyard with ever-increasing clarity of site pushing to the foreground. This is helped no doubt by our confidence that doing the absolute minimum of intervention in the Isolation Ridge Vineyard will, while expressing any given vintage, reflect typicity of site.
In the winery we do small ferments (many are 1,000 litres or less) with an increasing focus on indigenous yeast and barrel ferment, combined with extended lees maturation on all parcels through to November. These numerous small ferments allow complexity in the resulting wine through the diversity of yeasts, ferments and maturation vessels. We bottled the wine in mid-December and allowed it time in bottle until release in May 2022.  – Hunter Smith, Frankland Estate