Luke O’Cuinneagain

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207 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Luke O’Cuinneagain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Drinking Hour: With David Kermode - FoodFM · Episode 277 - Luke O’Cuinneagain of Vergelegen · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

Because I think with texture, the other thing that we haven't spoken about comes along, I think, which I love in wine, which is tension.

You need it to be quite taut.

And that's where, as a winemaker, you're constantly tasting and playing.

Do we, for instance, stir the leaves to get out a bit more richness or...

Do we want that tension that it's naturally got and will we lose that if we stir too much?

So you're constantly playing and it plays into blending as well.

I mean, if you think of blending and if I use the analogy of listening to music or if you're painting, the same applies.

If you're listening to music, it's fantastic listening to a violinist play a piece of music by herself.

But when you put that violinist into an orchestra and you have the influence of the wind instruments and the brass instruments, there's a natural richness and complexity that comes through in that music.

And the same applies to blending because we often view blending of just putting varietals together.

But blending actually starts back in the vineyards because you might have the same varietal, but it's planted on different soils.

So you're getting different aspects coming out.

So you have to decide, are we going to put them together or keep them separately?

There's different altitudes that give different aspects.

If you're going into oak, do you go into a medium toast barrel from this forest or do you go into a light toast from somewhere else?

And this all leads into blending.

So there's this constant building block.

And that's what makes, for me, why I'm making it so fun is that you're constantly looking at it

Yeah, I mean that was a skin fermented Sauvignon that we had done and we had fermented it quite fast.

And it was to look for a different textural profile, almost pithiness that's coming through, that we could use a small dash to bring interest back into the wine.

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