This was a blog writen on the Spingfield Estate web site last week. Its just fabulous.

Jenna Bruwer featured on our podcast last year. Listen Here. The magnificent Springfield wines are distributed in Ireland by Classic Drinks.

There are many quotes written about Time. They say Time is money, yet… they also say that Time is the most valuable thing a man could ever spend. Here at Springfield, we believe that Time is the master vintner, and so we allow our wines the gift of Time – which in today’s world, is the biggest luxury of all. Pictured here is our winery team putting down the latest vintage of Work of Time to rest and mature for the next four years. This cellar itself is a relic of time – a twin to the one where we make our wines, both built in the 1920s. The farm, now known as Springfield, was originally bought for two Bruwer brothers – who each built an identical cellar on their half – before it was rejoined as one farm in the late ’70s. While the Springfield cellar has evolved and expanded over the years, this one has stayed exactly the same – and now makes the perfect home for our wines to mature gracefully for a few years or more.  Wines benefit greatly from time – their flavours mellow and meld into one another, their edges soften, their nuances develop. Fresh fruit moves towards cooked, preserved flavours, hints of spice come to the fore, and wood tannins transform to notes of smoke and leather.  Nowadays, very few people buy wine to mature in their cellars – space, like time, is a hard-to-find commodity in the modern age.  It is therefore our duty to age our wines for our customers, to keep them for as long as it might take, as it is our name on the bottle and our honour at stake. We are sure that by now you know, our motto, Made on Honour, influences every facet of our being. As a result, our white wines are bottle aged for anything from three months to two years prior to release, and our red wines are matured first in oak barriques, then bottles,  for many more –  in the case of the Work of Time and Methode Ancienne Cabernet, for two years in barrel and then four in bottle – until it is at the optimal age to start enjoying. Ageing entire vintages for so long takes up a lot of space in any cellar, and we are fortunate to have a home for these wines while they mature. It takes about two weeks of daily work to move a vintage of one wine across cellars – and again the same amount of time & effort years down the line when we need to move the wine back in order to label and release to the world. They say Time is merciless and can move faster or slower as it pleases – and trust us,  the two kilometer long drive with hundreds of clinking bottles rattling in wooden crates is eternal! We hope that all this effort means that Time slows down a bit for you too when you open a bottle of one of our cellar-matured wines – giving new meaning to the name which one of them bears – Work of Time. Kind regards, Jenna Bruwer & the Springfield Estate Team