Brash Higgins 'FRNC' 2022 Cabernet Franc Sands Vineyard McLaren Vale

750ml bottle
13.7% abv

Translucent violet in the glass. Lifted, aromatic, and brooding with jalapeño and alpine herbs. On the palate, roasted bell pepper, violets, ash, rose petal, and mulberry, with a luscious, pure mouthfeel and a long, smooth finish with dry, fine-grained tannins.

100% Cab Franc grown along a high ridge of an ancient sand dune and made at Brash HQ, fermented with wild yeast in open one-ton fermenters with five weeks of maceration and hand-plunged twice daily. The wine then spent fifteen months in eight-year-old French oak hogsheads before being bottled in August 2023 under Stelvin closure.

The 2022 vintage delivered even growing conditions with small berry set, yielding 380 cases from Martin Lightfoot's sustainably farmed Sands Vineyard on Foggo Road, McLaren Flat, 1988 vines grown on cracking black clay along the ridge of an ancient sand dune.