Wolf Alaser 2018

In short, when I bottled this wine, I absolutely hadn’t the faintest idea what was in this wine…

The Story:

Wine that’s aged in barrel constantly lose a little bit of volume due to the wood absorbing wine as well as evaporation. We call this the “The Angel’s Share”. In order to prevent the barrel from having a huge headspace and subsequently getting exposure to oxygen, we constantly need to fill the barrels. Every month we select a topping barrel. We then fill all barrels with the selected topping barrel’s wine, often not using the whole barrel. The leftover wine then go to a tank and eventually move on to a barrel. From that barrel we will then top again and then fill up the barrel with something else. So as you can see, this barrel has a life of its own and in 2018 this topping barrel was accidently of outstanding quality - and unfortunately we had no idea how we achieved that.

So I decided that we should bottle this wine on its own. A total production of 280 bottles.

The label: My son watched a documentary on the artist Banksy. He got inspired... - drew a picture of our pet rabbit called Brigitte and made a cut-out stencil of it. He then spray- painted it on a wall in our living room. Needing a mysterious Banksy-like signature, he named himself “The Wolf Alaser”... again I pay him per bottle sold. And no, I am not going to disclose the amount he gets.

After the success of Wolf Alaser I went on a hunt and digged through old notes and harvest sheets to try and figure out the possible components. We discovered scribbles and hints so we have a vague idea of what happened. I will give it my best shot when making up the 2019 blends. Watch this space...