Whinyard Rocks Orange Pet Nat 2023

This is a naturally lightly sparkling (Petillant Naturel) orange wine made with Solaris and Ortega. It offers rolling waves of bowls of ripe peaches on the nose, gliding into a gently savoury gambol of stone fruit. The lovely amber colour is thanks to nine leisurely days of skin contact for the Solaris and four for the Ortega, which also provide a gently grippy tannic structure. Unfiltered and unfined. Fermented with indigenous wild yeast.

Whinyard Rocks is a small-scale low-intervention vineyard on a fourth-generation sheep farm. The name is taken from a distinctive outcrop of exposed late Silurian rock on the farm. The vineyard began in 2017, when James and Susan moved from London with the dream of making wine on the family farm, and planted 800 vines by hand with friends. The vineyard now contains five white varieties – hybrids solaris, phoenix and muscaris, plus non-hybrids ortega and bacchus – and two hybrid reds – rondo and regent – for their flavour profiles and plucky ability to tolerate the valley’s altitude and cool Welsh climate. This spring, James and Susan planted 1600 more vines including two new red varieties – Cabaret Noir and Pinot Noir Précoce. The grapes are grown regeneratively and ferment on indigenous wild yeasts. Winemaking is done with a low-intervention approach and no synthetic chemicals are used in either the vineyard and winery. The wines contain no added sulphur, and don’t undergo any fining or filtering.