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Vintage 2023 Report
Cold, wet, an unbelievably slow ripening period, very drawn out, and possibly the greatest Mudgee red wine vintage ever...
It must be a figment of my imagination. Was it only a couple of years ago that drought and extreme heat battered us? Harvests – when not lost to bushfire smoke taint – were in January and early February. Vines struggled for survival. Roots retreated from baked soil and were left to suckle from a tiny zone under drippers.
Abundant winter rain and cooler temperatures in winter led to a late start to the growing season. The full moisture profile was like waking up in a big, comfy bed – the weary vines wanted to stay asleep just a few minutes more. After three years of amazing rain, milder temperatures and no heatwaves, the old vines could be forgiven for being a bit wary.
Once they had woken up, boy were they full of energy. Their roots raced out and grabbed all the sustenance they could, leading to canopies about three time the size of just a few years earlier. Through spring and summer, the vines luxuriated in the cooler temperatures and wetter soils, taking their sweet time to grow their berries.
The result was one of the latest vintages we've ever seen, 8 weeks later than recent drought vintages and a month later than average.
The final ripening happened in cool, dry conditions, ideal for flavour, acid and tannin development. In late summer and autumn Mudgee was blessed to be in a rain shadow compared to neighbouring regions.
The latest variety, grenache, was picked in early May, just days before the first frosts hit. Yields on all varieties were only slightly above average.
All varieties achieved full ripeness with reds excelling in terms of the strongest colors I have seen in Mudgee. Shiraz was undoubtedly the standout, showing vibrant and generous fruit flavours underpinned by ripe, fine tannins. Most are now in barrels where they will remain for a further year.
We won’t know for sure for two years or more, but I predict 2023 will go down as one of the greatest Mudgee vintages on record for red wines.
Vintage 2022 Report
Rain, rain, go away... What a vintage. It feels like it rained non-stop from bud burst to harvest. It's also been unseasonably cool. Cold and wet are ideal conditions for vine and soil health, but are seriously challenging for a Vigneron. I'm writing this on the 25th March and we have just picked our last [...]
Spring 2021 Ravings
In search of perfection. Robert Paul, possibly Mudgee’s finest former winemaker, pulled one of my favourite swifties a while back.He told the local rag he was off to the Ord River in northern Western Australia to grow “hydroponic Grange” in temperature-controlled glasshouses. The paper splashed the story across its front page, proclaiming every vintage would [...]
News from the Winery, Winter 2020
With the loss of the entire 2020 vintage due to smoke taint for us and all our contract clients, the winery is eerily quiet, clean, and sterile. There are so many aspects of the loss that hurt. Most obvious is the commercial impact – all that money spent for nothing, and 10,000 fewer cases of wine to sell to generate income [...]
2020 Vintage Report
We are devastated by the loss of our 2020 vintage due to smoke taint from the terrible bushfires 100kms away in the Blue Mountains and surrounds. It’s a kick in the guts for the whole team. We fought so hard to beat the drought and heat to produce truly beautiful fruit. The skies have been blue for weeks [...]
Vintage of the century?
Every vintage I have a bet with a mate to see who can make a public declaration that this one will be vintage of the century.It’s a ritual begun by the winemakers of the Hunter Valley decades ago. Their wet and warm climate means every other vintage is, invariably, pretty ordinary. Getting in front of [...]
Vintage 2017 - the story so far...
In a word, wet. Another word, bloody. Bloody wet sums it up nicely actually.The vines are as happy as pigs in muck, the Vineyard team not so much...With over 50 times more winter rain than last year so far, and more days of rain than not, pruning was an absolute nightmare to finish. There is [...]
Vintage Report 2016
Happy vines make happy wine. And happy wines make a happy winemaker.So it was with the 2016 Vintage just finished.In one of my recent Ravings I may have given the wrong impression that I wasn’t happy when I moaned about all of the hurdles in front of us poor vignerons; from droughts to floods, frosts to heatwaves. [...]
Vignerons do not have a natural inclination towards optimism.
Vignerons do not have a natural inclination towards optimism, and I’ll tell you why.It starts in winter each when pruners brave freezing cold and bitter winds to prune the dormant vines. It takes many months and is always a race to beat Spring’s wake-up call for the sleeping vineThen comes budburst, when the vine starts [...]
Tim's Raving
My predecessor Bob Roberts once told me that he has never seen two vintages even vaguely the same. We were talking not just about the actual weather conditions but also the tastes of the wine. From my limited perspective in Mudgee, he is dead right. The red wine vintages from 1997 to 2007 were, respectively; elegant, [...]
