The winery at Bosue Vineyard
Our own winery allows us to do all the winemaking here at Bosue. Bottling and labelling is all done here.
ShopThe wines are carefully made by Paul and Liz Sibley in the contemporary English style, ensuring throughout the winemaking process that the delicate natural flavours are preserved.
Our winemaking is very low fossil fuel input, the photos below show the hand operated crusher and destemmer in action, and the water pressure driven Hydropress. We only need electric power for the pump. Sparkling wine disgorging is done in the traditional method of several weeks in a pupitre rack, then neck chilled, hand disgorged and corked and muzzled by hand operated corker
Winemaking at Bosue Vineyard
Winemaking starts with the grape harvest, brought in from the vineyard to the winery
The first job is to gently crush and de stem the bunches, this removes the unwanted bunch stalks which can make the wine a bit astringent. From the crusher the grapes are left overnight in a sealed tank to extract colour and flavour before pressing the next day
The must is transferred to the press and the juice pumped in to fermentation tanks. We use a lot of water in cleaning up! Once settled, yeast is added and the ferment will start, cooled by water to preserve the fruit flavours.
Winter months are quiet as we like the wine to settle with just regular checks and racking off the lees, until we are ready to filter the wine ready for bottling
We usually bottle the white and rose wines in April or May, this has involved the whole family over the years!
We make our sparkling wine here, adding yeast and sugar to start the secondary fermentation, after which the bottled wine is stored away until disgorging, removal of the sediment. The bottles are moved to pupitres and the bottles gently turned and moved upright to settle the sediment in the neck of the bottle
The bottles then move to a neck freezer which forms a plug of frozen sediment in the neck, the cap of the bottle can then be removed which ejects the sediment plug. After final dosage, the cork is put in and muzzled and after labelling the wine is ready to sell in a few months.
