The Drift Over The Moon

You are an ancient Sumerian, a celebrated young citizen of one of the first great cities. You have been hunting since daybreak, and returning over the Euphrates and through the fortified walls of the great city, you are parched from the day’s ride. In short, you are dying for a drink – of beer.

When you reach your favourite pub, the light is failing and the owner bar-lady’s new slave is lighting tar lanterns at the door and cracking jokes with the prostitutes.

As you enter the wide room with its heavy beams and stone, beer-fermenting troughs, you smell something special, something unusual, something that only happens once a year – fermenting wine.

Being of noble birth you are ushered through the expectant throng and up a few sets of stairs where your friends are already seated in groups; drinking straws of river reed at the ready. The wine has been fermenting for three days. It has been drawn from beneath the risen cap of hand-destemmed grapes and transferred by gravity into clay drinking vessels.

You lick your lips and wink to your hunting companions. Your timing could not have been better. The clay drinking amphora are placed between drinking groups, some of whom have already started singing bawdy pub songs, such is the anticipation.

And that’s exactly how we made the main grape in this wine, Tourega Franca. We blended this grape of Portugal with another Portuguese grape used in Port production called Tinta Barocca.

And because we are obsessively experimental we made the Tinta Barocca the way ancient Egyptians crafted wine – mostly by a method called carbonic maceration; still practiced today, which allows whole bunches to ferment without being destemmed. This you will see enhances the intriguingly lively, red berry aroma. We blended these two ancient winemaking efforts with some manually punched-down Shiraz for a bit of structure.

When I was asked what I thought of my experimentation, my answer was simple – I was “Over the Moon!”, hence the name we have chosen. I’d like to think that those Sumerians back from their hunting trip 4000 years ago would have tasted something quite similar.

Far too many winemakers chuck their wine in barrels for the extra flavour, not understanding the historical context of barrels, or their ancillary benefits to the chemistry of winemaking. Often the barrels are new and dominate the subtle aromas and flavours of a wine. It’s impossible to argue that a wine shows a sense of place when smothered in oak – it certainly doesn’t show a sense of history like “Over the Moon” does. That’s why we use much older barrels with no obvious wood character.