HPW - VINS HODGSON HARVEST WINE 2022

in the harvest of 2022 myself and two friends were fortunate to go out to Anjou and spend two weeks helping harvest with Mai & Kenji Hodgson. We picked a lot of Chenin Blanc, cleaned a lot of equipment and met a lot of great people. Though it was hard work it never felt like it, I guess getting to drink old vintages of Aussigouins & Faia at harvest lunch helped... 

While we there we were given the opportunity by Mai & Kenji to barrel a wine from some of the grapes we'd picked from two of the vineyards that make up some of what goes into their Faia cuvee. We filled an old barrel gifted to them by Richard Leroy on the morning of the day we had to head back to the UK, said a prayer and waited. After getting the OK from Kenji that the wine was ready to bottle, we headed back the next May to bottle it by hand, with no additions of course, with a label we'd created from a picture taken on the trip of a chair behind their cellar that offered rest after a long day picking fruit.  We had some 'help' from Jun Hodgson on the labelling too. 

After a long rest we have decided that now is the time to release this wine, one of less than 300. We think it's tasting good already, but will be cellaring this for a number of years, partly to remember those sunny harvest days and partly because we tasted some incredible old vintages of Hodgson Chenin on that trip which if this wine gets even halfway too, it'll have been worth the wait.

Picture taken in the arctic by Shaun Hencher (also the principal label art creator.)

All the best!

13.5%

75cl