Tangent by Alexia 2021 Wairarapa Gamay
TANGENT: from the Latin ‘tangere’, meaning to touch.
Tangent is about small parcels, emerging varieties and one-offs, made when the seasons allow.
Our third crop from these 15-year-old vines pulled up onto wires for the first time for the 2019 vintage.
The 2021 vintage was warm and relatively dry, giving us a wonderful opportunity to harvest beautifully ripe grapes. Small bunches and berries created a wine of ripeness and intensity…this is a serious style from the Beaujolais grape.
Handpicked, 100% whole bunch, part carbonic fermentation, aged in neutral oak for 11 months.
Raspberry, gunflint, chalky, demanding.
The grapes for Tangent come from a small experimental block our growers Julie and Simon planted years ago but never harvested. They called it the ‘fruit salad’ block - a mixture of Chenin, Gamay, Cabernet Franc, Syrah and a couple of other varieties. A few little rows of gold in one corner of the vineyard.
The block had been growing as bush vines for the past decade, but we pulled them up onto wires and harvested grapes from them for the first time for the 2019 vintage.
The vines and the wines are both works in progress, evolving with us.