Minimal-intervention winemaking
Our winemaking philosophy is simple: preserve what the vineyard grew and create balance and harmony, allowing the fruit and site to shine. Thus, ‘minimal intervention’ best describes our winemaking style.
Our winery is NASAA Certified Organic.
Our winery is located right beside our Tasting Room, on our Arranmore estate. All CRFT Wines are made by us – Candice Helbig and Frewin Ries – inside an old shed, which we retrofitted for winemaking.
The winery is just a minute’s walk from our home, so we’re closely in touch with our wines. It’s not unusual for us to duck out and check the ferments last thing before bed during the busy vintage months.
We steer away from winemaking labels that are poorly defined or unclear. That’s one reason we’ve chosen to obtain NASAA Organic Certification for our entire Arranmore property and winery – it’s a clearly defined system that gives wine lovers clarity that we are striving to make naturally great wines that are good for people and environment too.
The result is fine wines of balance, that can be cellared and that last – wines that are exciting now and will be exciting in 10 years and more.
Single-vineyard wines since 2012.
Making wines that bring focus back to the grower and the site wasn’t really a big thing in South Australia back when we started in 2012.
Although it’s gaining popularity now, which is great to see, sometimes it’s still impossible to know a wine's origin beyond the winemaker and region.
Our story is the vine-to-glass story. We celebrate community and provenance by bringing attention to our growers and their location. We want to show the unique characters each vineyard has to offer - how soil and season affect flavour, and allow you to taste each individual site.
That’s why we focus on single-vineyard wines, and strive for a winemaking approach that allows the vineyard to shine. It always surprises us just how much variation can come from vineyards separated by only a kilometre or two.
And that’s why we offer wine flights in our Tasting Room – so you can try wines from different vineyards side-by-side and taste the difference for yourself.
For us, Minimal-intervention winemaking starts in the vineyard.
Fruit grown here at our Arranmore Vineyard is NASAA Certified Organic and picked by hand. Many of the grapes we source from other vignerons in South Australia are grown using organic principles, and we continue to chat with our growers and advocate for a move to full organic certification.
Then, into the winery. Here, it’s all about letting the individual vineyard shine. So we avoid synthetic additions, genetically-modified products and imported commercial yeasts. Instead, wild ferments are the norm, using the natural yeasts present on the skins of our grapes.
We don’t add vitamins or nutrients during fermentation, but instead hand-plunge our ferments to keep hydrogen sulfide at bay and increase oxygen levels. It’s a good full-body workout.
Our NASAA Organic Certification limits the amount of sulphur we can add to our wines – and we’re happy to say that limit is well below the legal Australian maximum limit.
We use gravity to clarify our wines. So rather than filtering our reds, we rack off the lees multiple times a year, gently removing any mucky solids that fall to the bottom and keeping the clear, clarified wine.
And because we avoid harsh chemical cleaners, we can apply our ‘wastewater’ straight back onto our vineyard. Winery wastewater is high in nutrients, which at our place go straight back onto the land to fertilise our vines.
