Cork Talk with Victoria Mason

And you've made a wine, haven't you? It's coming out soon.

I'm not sure I can quite claim having made the wine in its entirety, but I do have a collaboration wine coming out soon.

early, probably at the beginning of next year, actually, that you might get a chance to taste it in autumn.

So this is the result of the 2025 harvest, the amazing 2025 harvest, albeit in the swat land.

So I worked with Donovan Rahl.

I was determined to work with him and do a surah harvest.

So I specifically spent basically two weeks in vats of surah, stomping those grapes, because Donovan works entirely whole bunch, and all those grapes are foot trodden.

So the very first day that I was working with him, we went out to sample in this incredible vineyard that he works with, sort of not so far from the Kasteelberg, not so far from where his cellar is.

So it's a 10 hectare Syrah vineyard, which goes into his amazing Ava Syrah, as well as his concrete Syrah.

We sampled the vineyard.

And we picked that first ton the next day and Donovan sort of called it the sacrificial ton in the sense that we wanted to get it in the cellar, see how the analysis was looking once it was actually in the cellar, because sometimes it can be quite different from when you're sampling in the vineyard, get a sense of the tannin profiles and all the rest of it.

So that sacrificial ton came into the cellar, went into the first vat, the first sort of, it's almost like a big white tub really.

And Donovan said to me, that's your ton.

You need to keep an eye on that ton.

Now, the truth is I obviously kept an eye on all the tons, but that specific ton was from the beginning of my harvest to the end of my harvest in the sense that on my last day, it had almost finished.

It was almost fermented to dryness.

It's like about two grams residual left and it was tasting amazing.

It went to barrel as its own component with my initials on it.

And so I sort of started to call it my syrup, but actually more often our syrup.

But when Donovan came to blending for his main syrup, his concrete syrup, and then his Ava syrup, that single component on its own was something, it was sort of, it was too intense.

It was almost too, it was too tannic as a standalone component.

I don't know what that tells you about me, but anyway.

Sorry.

So it was then Donovan blended it with some of his concrete Syrah and also some of the offcuts from the Ava Syrah, so some of the Fudra, and has created this sort of really gorgeous like textbook Swartland Syrah, but with an earlier approachability than his other Syrahs.

So we've called it, we have called it Onsvin, Our Wine.