NADESON COLLIS, the newest member of our wine family, are artisanal sparkling wines and the most recent passion and project of Ray Nadeson and Maree Collis, creators of Lethbridge Wines.
Using the finest Chardonnay & Pinot Noir from Drumborg, Henty, Nadeson and Collis have produced three concept wines, a Non vintage, Vintage and the Perpetual Blend. Each year the grapes are whole-bunch pressed and fermented in a mixture of 1300lt & 2500lt foudre before undergoing a period of barrel maturation prior to tirage.
The Inception is the non-vintage wine made with 80% of the current vintage wine with the addition of approximately 20% from the perpetual blend. The Millesime is the vintage wine, made only in exceptional years and the Coda is derived 100% from the perpetual blend, a solera topped each year, beginning in 2006. This is a complex changing blend, used in small amounts to enhance the Inception, but when deemed exquisite, a portion removed and bottled as Coda.
Mike Bennie - "People talk about playing a long-game in the wine industry, but few adhere to it like Maree Collis and Ray Nadeson of Lethbridge Wines, and less still can point to a project as patient and committed as the Nadeson Collis range of new wines.
Without even going into their commitment to cause in building their home, winery and vineyards themselves from scratch, I’m referring to the fact that the unmistakably dense, complex and concentrated backbone of these new wines has been a project for over 13 years…
In 2006, Maree & Ray started a solera of some of their finest Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Pinot Gris, with a vision to create a sparkling wine of incomparable style. This is a system where you age a mature batch of wine in a large barrel, and both remove some each year to use in blending, and top up with the same amount of young, fresh wine for the next vintage. It creates a single batch of wine that is made up, in this case, of 13 individual year’s wines.
It’s this single foudre (large, oval-shaped barrel) that feeds the new wines at various levels, bringing density and complexity to each bottling, and is topped up each year with the equivalent in current vintage wine.
When I first tried the finished wines, I spoke to Ray and tried to summarise my feelings. It went something like this - “it’s like the best of the small production champagnes in aspiration - intensely powerful wines that are based on oxidatively handled fruit, leading to powerful complexity, with aldehydes that are integrated throughout the palate. A kind of Australian Selosse, I suppose”.
This is a way of saying they are truly unique for Australia.