The Ladder Chenin Blanc 2023

The Ladder is the steepest ground we farm: eleven terraces cut into the slope below Wallgrow, each one about as wide as a wheelbarrow is long. Nothing mechanical goes up there. Every bunch comes down in a crate on somebody’s shoulder, and the crates hold eight kilos rather than twenty because we tried twenty once.

We planted Chenin on it in 2011 against the advice of everyone who visited. The argument against was that it would not ripen at 260 metres. The argument for was that Chenin is the one white grape that does not mind being made to wait, and the terraces trap enough afternoon heat off the slate walls to get it there in all but the worst Octobers.

Why old wood

Four barrels, 400 litres each, bought secondhand from a Loire grower who was replacing them. They were already five years old when they arrived. We want the air through the stave and nothing from the wood itself — a new barrel would put vanilla on a wine that has spent all summer earning something better.

The wine sits on its lees for eleven months with no stirring. It goes cloudy, then sulky, then very slightly waxy, and at about month nine it starts smelling of apple skin rather than apple. That is when we stop tasting it every week and start leaving it alone.

In the glass

The skin of a cooking apple rather than the flesh. Beeswax, chamomile, and a slightly lanolin, wet-wool thing that divides the room: roughly half the people at the bar love it and the other half ask whether it is meant to smell like that. It is.

Serve at twelve degrees, not colder. Cold kills the texture, and the texture is the point.