"Could you ever need me,
And would you know how?"
Christie McVie (1979)
And there begins Tusk, Fleetwood Mac's epic follow up to their epic album Rumours. After that album blew up the entire planet with its undeniable and enduring awesomeness, only a band of intergalactic genius would kick off the follow up with an introspective ballad like Over & Over.
What a track and what a false dawn, as the next track The Ledge blows the collective Fleetwood Mac fan hive band into smithereens with its overt weirdness and foreshadows the fact that nothing about 'the Mac' will ever be the same again. What an important moment in music history, the band that helped create the sound of smooth LA cool announces its end, with Roxy Music's Avalon to come as a fitting epitaph in 1982.
For this reason, Over & Over signifies the ability to break with the past, transcend expectation and convention, to redefine yourself, and to be thoroughly awesome all at the same time.
Over & Over Pinot Noir celebrates a very special ultra high elevation site, the Eminence VIneyard on the Whitlands Plateau (830m). Grown by the wonderful Burder family and the ecology focused Peter Allen, this Pinot shows the proper plasticity that a single vineyard in an extreme clime should. Muscular in moderate years, ephemeral in the cooler ones... and 2022 was definitely the latter (only to be trumped by 2023, but that's a story for another day).
Production notes:
Picked on the 26th of April. Destemmed without crushing and soaked at 4C for 4 days with two pump overs daily. Left to undergo natural ferment and kept at 22C for 3 weeks at which point it was pressed off just before it was dry. Left to complete fermentation, settled racked and then transferred to 95% old french oak and 5% new Hungarian oak hogshead. 10 months resting in oak and then the blend was put together at which point it was racked once more prior to bottling. Unfined, unfiltered with a small addition of sulphur.
Tasting notes:
The most delicate Pinot we've produced from this magical vineyard, aromas of plum skin and capocolla with palate of blueberry, violet and raw forest mushroom. Best enjoyed with a good source of proper San Daniele prosciutto drizzled with a lighter expression of local EVOO.
