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THE MORTIMER METHOD
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During the early 1990s Tim Mortimer commenced a small wine production to try some alternative approaches to red winemaking.The primary ideas were drawn from traditional (although not red) winemaking practice. The aim being to find ways of extending the barrel maturation to enhance characteristics such as smoothness, length of flavour and longevity. A short maturation in a new barrel does not always work well, since the earliest extracted oak tannins do not have enough time to soften along with the ingress of oxygen into the barrel. On the other hand a longer maturation might lead to the wine losing too much freshness and vibrancy, or maybe becoming over-oaked and unbalanced. One approach might be to draw something from the solero system in Spanish sherry making where older barrels are continuously infused with younger and fresher wine from a previous vintage. Eventually this might result in a non-vintage wine, but then, this is normal in the region of Champagne. Applying this to red winemaking is a subtle process over time, building a wine’s body and depth of flavour as a barrel is further extracted. At the same time the wine is kept fresh with the introduction of new blend components from subsequent vintages. There is a gradual layering effect, and textural attributes are enhanced. The end result is a smoother tasting wine, but with a layering of tannins contributing to robustness and the ability of the wine to mature further in bottle. Since the main concern is to blend the available wine parcels for maximum benefit, the constraints of normal marketing considerations that tend to guide the blending process are set aside. Hence, the wines are numbered sequentially with a year of bottling rather than by relying on designation of a variety, region or vintage year on the label.
Back to Wines page | Wine Presentation | Closures and Storage | Review of the first six wines
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