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Tim's Ravings

Posted by Tim Stevens on

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 now. The grapes are sweet, flavoursome and ready to pick, but the Australian Wine Research Institute test results, and our own bucket ferments show that they are tainted by smoke, and so we cannot and will not make them into wine.

Our top priority is the quality of our wines and keeping the confidence and trust of our customers. We would never make and sell a wine that isn’t up to the high standards we set for ourselves. We will not compromise on quality.

We began the soul-destroying task of dropping tonnes of perfect looking fruit a few weeks ago. We had hoped the Cabernet might make it in because it ripens later, but 60 days of smoke proved too much.

It’s the most depressing job – especially for our Vineyard Manager Paul who has given a year of his life to nurturing the crop, but we can’t just leave the grapes on the vine. Picking the fruit removes the risk of disease entering the vine via rotting fruit, and sends a signal to the vine to send its roots down to replenish nutrient and store carbohydrates for the next season. 


We’re luckier than many. This is the first vintage we’ve lost in our 50 years of operation; our beautiful region didn’t burn; we have reds from 2016 and onwards still to come, and we have decent stocks of recently and still to be released 2019 whites to eke out until May 2021 when the next vintage is in bottle.


NEWS FROM THE VINEYARD FEB 2020

This brutal drought went from bad to worse in the second half of 2019 and extreme heat in the run up to Christmas really took its toll.

We enjoyed a brief but welcome respite mid-January, and are loving an extended cool period at the time of writing. There is plenty of rain around, and although we seem to keep missing the best of the storms (fuelling my persecution complex), we’ve had around 30mm over several falls in January – a first step on the road to recovery. February has seen regular falls of around 10 to 15 mm a week and the country is starting to feel alive again.

The vineyard headlands, gardens and grounds are greening up, and we had to mow the lawns last week for the first time this whole season! The drought is far from broken however, our run off dams remain dry and cracked, and the moisture probes show the soil profile is bone dry, with combined rain and irrigation only reaching the top 30cms or so.

On Friday 24th January we received the awful news that the whites and pinot have smoke taint so instead of beginning vintage four weeks ago as planned, the harvesters were cancelled and we’ve started to drop the grapes on the ground to add organic matter back into the soil to boost vine health for 2021 and beyond; conserve the vine’s energy; prevent disease and feed the birds, insects and assorted wildlife.

Although the bush fires were 100km away, Mudgee’s skies were hazy with smoke from November to mid-January. Smoke tainted grapes look and taste perfect on the vine – the off characters (ashtray) only emerge post-fermentation and over time. Diagnostic tests for the presence of the smoke compounds are conducted by the AWRI (Australian Wine Research Institute), and we also conduct a series of micro-ferments in buckets for sensorial assessment. We ‘lost’ the Shiraz last week, and last night got the news about the Cabernet.

We’re still pouring on the water (thank goodness for Solar Power). We applied sunscreen (kaolin - a superfine clay) to the grapes to prevent sunburn and slow the ripening process. We’ve kept up the nutrition. Despite our best efforts however, the vines are stressed, and where they’re competing for resources with the big gum trees that surround the vineyard they are losing the battle for life. We’re pleasantly surprised to see that yields were only slightly impacted by the drought, with an estimate of 100T for the entire vineyard – a testament to the calibre of the team and the strategies we have worked so hard to put into place. Fruit quality is really, truly great (apart from the smoke of course) – a source of pride but it just makes it all even more depressing. The recent moderate rain and cool spell would have been a textbook perfect finish to ripen the reds. Waaah!

The 3 year old Grenache is thriving as anticipated in these tough conditions (so much so that I had to fruit-thin 50% over Christmas to curb its enthusiasm), and although the brand new block of Grenache planted in October is a bit of a disaster with only around 25% of new vines surviving, the new Chardonnay is growing magnificently with around 90% survival, most of them 1M plus tall, growing vigorously above their protective guards and along the guide wire.

All our energy is now focused on bringing home a stunning result in 2021. 

NEWS FROM THE WINERY FEB 2020

Planning for vintage was a lot more challenging than usual as we tried to second-guess yields / smoke impact to order oak barrels, yeasts etc, and organise labour.

We’re in the worst-case scenario for the vintage now, and so are working on the redeployment of the winery team into the vineyard to help drop fruit, and are pulling out the dusty list of ‘nice to have’ projects that we never have time to complete in a normal year.

The 2019 reds in barrel are going to be showered in even more love, care and attention than usual. I look forward to a spick and span winery, with everything working, everything in its place and some truly amazing wines to put into bottle later in the year.

300m of solar panels to power the winery are going in as I write. Once we’ve paid off the panels and inverter, we’ll invest in commercial batteries and should become self-sufficient. In the meantime, we’re going to hook up our generator to the main power box in anticipation of increased power outages, so we can secure power at critical times.

My pride and joy is the DIY Evaporative cooling unit we designed, fabricated and installed for our Hay Shed (museum and pre-release wine storage) just before Christmas. With its thick concrete slab, walls made of hay bales and rendered for natural insulation – the hay shed has provided more than adequate temperature control for the last 40 years. These last 10 years however have tested it, and I’ve been wanting to install a cooling system for several years now. This year’s heat turned that want into a need. A commercial unit would have set us back $125k (gotta sell a lot of wine to cover that), so a bit of good old fashioned Aussie ingenuity (plus the magic of YouTube) and we are dropping the temperature a whopping 14 degrees! We’ve borrowed technology used in greenhouses and chook sheds - we trickle water over corrugated cardboard pads and use a fan to pull air through the pads (thereby chilling it) and blow this cooled air into the hall. Simple, beautiful and best of all we got change from $3k. I’m a very stable genius.

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