Description
At Nautilus we like to keep things simple so we have a small (and friendly!) team. A small team means everyone can be fully involved in the winemaking from start to finish. It also means Clive, our winemaker, can spend his time in the winery making wine rather than managing a large team of people. It is a pretty hands-on approach. Great winery facilities mean that we can pick our grapes when they are ripe rather than being governed by logistics and we have a great deal of control over things like the amount of extraction (the colour and flavour) we get out of the grape skins.
Family ownership means we have the benefit of generations of experience through the highs and lows of wine-growing – our owner Robert Hill Smith is a fifth-generation vigneron – and also means that we take a long-term, cautious approach. We only make a change if we are really, really convinced it adds to the quality of what we do.
Nautilus is unusual in effectively having two wineries side by side. The first was built in 2000 and is dedicated to the inspiring but sometimes infuriating grape that is Pinot Noir.
In 2006, we completed our second winery on the site: a new white wine making facility to process our Sauvignon Blanc, Cuvee, Chardonnay and Pinot Gris. This facility allows us to precisely control the winemaking process and has improved the environmental footprint of the winery by reducing energy requirements and waste.
