Gravitas Hugo's Delight Late Harvest Riesling 2005 (37.5cl)

Established in 1996 by Wines’ Director, Martyn Nicholls who after leaving a career in merchant banking decided to go into the winemaking business. Gravitas winery is located in the Upper Wairau in the South Islands of New Zealand.

A family owned estate, Gravitas produces a distinctive range of ultra-premium hand crafted wines from low cropped and hand picked Marlborough fruit. Driven by the desire to produce old world style wines vs the commonly focused fruit wines so often found in New Zealand, Gravitas wines tend to be dry, food focused and European in style.

According to Nicolls:

“As part of Gravitas’ ongoing efforts to produce outstanding wines from healthy vineyards we subscribe to a vigorous eco-program called “Sustainable Wine growing New Zealand”
We have approximately 40 hectares (100 acres) of vineyards located in Marlborough, New Zealand’s premier wine growing region. This is also the region with the most sunshine hours per year – an average of about 9 a day!

Within Marlborough our vineyards are spread over an 80km (50 mile) range of terroir and this gives us a rich pallet of grapes to paint with.
Our main vineyard is at the top end of the Wairau Valley - a significantly cooler area than other parts of the valley closer to the sea and with a day/night temperature variation that can be extremely high. The temperature characteristics of this area aligned with very deep, free-draining and stony soils produce wines that show an interesting range of fruit characters (more citrus than other parts of the valley) and a distinctive mineral note.

As for our viticulture practices, wines of great stature can only be made with grapes of supremely high quality, so…

- Virtually all vine work (leaf-plucking etc) is carried out by hand.

- We monitor vineyard conditions by computerized sensors which beam up moisture and temperature data every half hour to a private website, which management can access from anywhere in the world.

- Our computer controlled irrigation system is highly sophisticated and can water 20 different blocks differently, according to the needs of each block.

- We operate a minimal-use chemical regime,are certified under the low chemical Sustainable Wine growing Program and are preparing for conversion to organic grape growing. we protect our grapes with over 20 km of nets to avoid any bird damage.

- We keep yields to very low levels (as low one half those of the great Premiers Crus of Bordeaux).

- We generally harvest by hand – and often go through the same block a half dozen times on different days – just picking the perfect grapes each time

Finally we focus very much on top-end retailers, never supermarkets – or top-end restaurants like Gordon Ramsay who at one point was our biggest customer in the world, and we were his biggest supplier of white wine,"