We recycle all our water and therefore prefer working with steam rather than hard cleaning substances. Also it’s too big for what we require, uses lots of power and goes against our philosophy of gentle winemaking.

We decided to go back to the original principle of filtering called depth filtration using plates and frame. Traditionally, you do several passes through the plate and frame filter, going from coarse filter sheets to medium and then fine. This means three lots of pumping, three lots of dirty tanks, three lots of cleaning and you keep losing CO² on the way. What I wanted to do was to go from cloudy to sterile wine in a single pass. It’s common to have two different grades of filter sheets on the filter, but the unique concept was to add a third. Filtration experts around the world said we couldn’t do it. They wouldn’t even sell us the equipment. But I believed in the concept.

With help from a local engineer we manufactured the equipment and the new system works beautifully: it’s very quiet and energy efficient, gentle on the wine because of eliminated pumping steps and easier on the environment. I also love the fact that I now fully control filtration, rather than a contractor. Looking back, it’s been very satisfying to turn an idea into reality and take another step towards our goal of less intrusive winemaking.

At harvest time I’m there sorting every single bucket of fruit. Anything that’s not right gets biffed and then I’m 100% confident of what’s going into the tanks. I really believe that if you get it right in the vineyard that’s where the great wine comes from. When I worked for big companies there was none of that interaction with every step.

Suddenly 20 tonnes of grapes arrived and it was the first time I’d seen the fruit. Whereas here, I’m really hands-on and out among the vines all the time, looking at the weather patterns. Do we need to take a few more leaves off or is it going to be a hot summer? Should we leave a few more leaves on? Do we need new machinery? Should we tweak the filtration system? I’m always looking to improve both the winery side and every step in the vineyard.

We don’t want to lose the ability to be this involved so if we get to about 5000 cases that’s probably the limit to stay hands-on the way we are now. We like the fact that when Ursula and I have a board meeting, it’s at the dining table. Ursula does the budgeting and I can say ‘well, have we got a budget to experiment with this idea, it may not work but I think it’s worth a shot.’ This is so much easier than trying to be innovative in a corporate structure! Being this size also means we can stick to our winemaking philosophy of simplifying processes with absolutely no compromise.

Different people have different thresholds on bitterness. My threshold is very low and I used to remove any hint of a bitter aftertaste. But when you fine to take out bitterness you also lose flavour and colour.

When we started making our wines we got a couple of comments that our Sauvignon looked like water and I started to wonder whether we’re over-fining? In the international judging world it’s not just about the actual bitterness: If you’ve got a lot of flavour, mid palate and nice colour then the judges would say ‘okay it is a little bit bitter but it can handle that bitterness because it is a big wine’. And that’s our philosophy now. We try not to fine unless we really have to. And we can do that because of our gravity-fed winery and our choice to reduce processes.

This is the whole thing about gentle wine making – we don’t over-press and we don’t do extra pumping. Every time you pump or press the juice or wine it’s a rubbing motion and that basically creates bitterness. By simplifying our processing steps we have very limited bitterness pick up and as a consequence we don’t have to fine, apart from using Bentonite clay to extract the proteins. It means our wines don’t have the classic fining agents added such as fish, milk or egg extracts, so we can offer a wine that’s a very natural, vegan friendly product, produced with minimal additives.

My choice is to make wines that reflect each year’s grapes and by reducing finings we’re ensuring the least impact on that natural flavour.