Picked on the 27th April and passed through our hand-sorting table, de-stemmed into an open fermenter for 13 days maceration kept at a very cool temperature.

The must is drained  after 13 days allowing only the free run portion to collect into a 2800-litre tank.  This young wine slowly exhausts the final throes of fermentation and then launches into a secondary  malolactic fermentation. This cool effervescent wine then transferred to barrels so as to polymerise the tannin naturally. Sulphur was added in October 2022. Bottled in November 2022. Clarity is entirely due to gentle winemaking , time on skins providing the necessary tannin to clarify the wine.

These skin contact wines are new in Australia and perhaps the vocabulary to match is not at the ready. Our goal is to celebrate the spicyness of the skin character that seeps into the palate. This wine has a dense, even chalky, texture and the depth of the wine makes up for the shorter length. For us, we don’t want these wines to be astringent and so we keep the press portion out.

Quealy Winemakers were first in Australia to make Friulano. Our planting stock was via a private vineyard in Mildura who had taken cutting from the CSIRO Antcliffe collection in the early 70’s

Quealy Winemakers established their Friulano vineyard by grafting onto one of their Chardonnay blocks in 2003. Friulano behaviour is late, moderate vigour, with a tendency to overcrop. The advantage to heavy crops is the vines are primed to exhaust their energies on flavour and ripeness. We remove all but the first inflourescence on the shoots we select in spring so the vine has its strong drive to ripen it’s grapes but the total yield is more than halved, concentrating the flavour and quality at harvest. We encourage the sun to burnish Friulano grape skins as it’s a definite quality factor. Achieved by sensitive canopy management and late harvest.