Winemaking

Striving for balance, elegance and complexity

Our meticulous approach in the vineyard continues in the winery, with sensitive winemaking techniques allowing the wines to express a sense of place without other influences dominating. These techniques have been at the heart of the Voyager Estate winemaking philosophy for more than 20 years. It is for this reason that we have been able to forge a reputation for balanced, elegant, subtle wines of great character and with a sense of place that is uniquely southern Margaret RIver.

Oak

We use very high quality, predominantly tight-grained French oak. Our aim is for the oak to offer structure and complexity to the wine and support the full expression of the vineyard site, rather than assert its own characteristics in the wine. Again, this is about balance. (download MAGNUM 28 article)

Small Batch

We use small batch fermentation to keep small blocks, or particular parts of a block, separate throughout the fermentation and maturation process. This means that we can use the final blending stage to achieve balance and finesse in our wines.

Fruit Care

Sensitive handling of the fruit includes hand harvesting, individually sorting and whole bunch pressing Chardonnay.

We use a sorting table to hand-sort red fruit. This involes removing leaves, stalks and other materials to ensure that only fruit enters the fermentation vessel. Keeping the Cabernet at 28 degrees during this process preserves the fruit-freshness.

Fermentation

We use wild yeast in Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc to create complexity and texture, resulting in wines with more interesting characters and flavours. We only use the gently pressed juice from the white grapes for our Estate wines, resulting in finer, more elegant wines.