Pant Du Vineyard

We lunched at Pant Du vineyard near Carnarvon.

We’d last visited in 2012 and was interested to see what had happened in the intervening 11 years. Well, they’d built a café with a full menu and had a little shop. And planted many apple trees for cider and juices. They also had their own spring water and honey.

But the wine now seemed side-lined. There’s nine acres of vines and twice the acreage of apple trees. I don’t know if they’d increased the size of their vineyard and there didn’t seem to be anyone there that could talk wine.

According to the website

There are 6 different varieties of vines planted on the slopes of Pant Du - Seyval Blanc, Sigrrebe*, Souvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Frühburgunder / Early Pinot Noir, Rondo.

The café menu listed red, white and rose wines by the glass, but when I asked what the white was the waitress didn’t know and had to ask the bartender. It was Seyval Blanc (their other white is Siegerrebe) and I had a glass. Krisie had a glass of red. I quite like Seyval Blanc but this was ho-hum. The red had a warm deep red colour which came from Rondo, a variety for which I’ve not acquired a taste.

Still wines cost £17.95 a bottle and the sparkling was £32.95. There’s no info where the wines are made, nor name of winemaker. A code on the back label shows the wine was bottled by Greencroft. I don’t know how the sparkling wine was made; the back label says it was traditionally fermented, not that it was made by the ‘traditional method’, i.e. methode champenoise.

Lack of transparency, cost of wines and disappointing tastes of the red and Seyval Blanc meant this was a rare winery on this island that made no sale to me.

*Siegerrebe

In the evening we enjoyed a really good meal at Poachers, a restaurant we'd not been to before. They are full every night they're open and luckily Dan had got us a booking.