Reading a wine by its colour
Tilt the glass against a white cloth and look at the rim. The colour there is the closest thing wine has to a birth certificate.
Tilt the glass against something white and look at the very edge of the wine, where it thins to nothing against the glass. That rim is where a wine tells you its age, and it is the whole idea this estate is built around.
Why young wine is purple
The colour of a young red comes from anthocyanins — pigments pulled out of the grape skins during fermentation. At the acidity of wine they hold a blue edge, which is why a wine bottled in its first year reads violet, almost magenta, at the rim.
Those free pigments are not stable. Over months and years they bind to tannins and to each other, forming larger molecules that hold their colour differently. The wine browns, slowly and predictably, and the hue turns: violet gives way to ruby, ruby to brick, brick to garnet, and eventually to the tawny and amber of a truly old bottle.
The arc, in one bottle at a time
You can watch the whole path if you line our wines up in age order, which is exactly how the range is arranged on this site. The current Pinot is a clean ruby. The Claret, a few years older, already shows a brick edge. The Old Vine Reserve is garnet through the middle. And the Library 1998 has almost no red left at the rim at all.
Nothing about that order is a marketing choice. It is what the chemistry does, and it does it in the same direction every time.
The exception
White wine skips the whole business. It carries no anthocyanins to begin with, so its colour does not travel the red arc — it holds at straw and, if anything, deepens very slightly toward gold. Our Chalk Bacchus sits on the range page as exactly that: the exception that shows the rule.
Come to a tasting and we will pour the vertical for you, youngest to oldest, and you can watch the rim change colour down the row.