Our winemaker, Belinda Gould, and vineyard manager Gwyn Williams are both dedicated to the production of unique, hand-crafted wines. All canopy and crop management is done by hand with meticulous attention to detail. Each vine is treated as an individual, with the resulting balance reflected in the wines. The extra vineyard work we do gives us open vines and low crop levels. This in turn means minimal use of vineyard chemicals and results in more flavour.

All fruit is hand-picked from our own vineyards and travels no more than 500m to the winery for processing.

All the grapes are hand-sorted on our conveyor/sorting table which gently elevates the whole clusters to the press or destemmer. The white wines are carefully pressed as whole clusters to give minimal skin contact and clean unoxidised juice. The reds are destemmed using gravity and fermented in small open-top fermenters, the caps are managed by hand. Because the fruit is in near-perfect condition, the juice is fermented by the native yeasts from our vineyards and almost no winemaking additives are used.

Our philosophy of the wines reflecting the vineyards means that in the cellar the wines are pumped and handled as little as possible and when we can we bottle without fining or filtration.

In April 2002 we joined the New Zealand Screwcap Wine Seal Initiative and bottled our 2001 Chardonnay and Laborare using screwcap seals. This has been the biggest single quality step we have ever made at Muddy Water. Read about it - Screwcaps