2009 Vintage Report

All the grapes have now been crushed, the wine is (mostly) in the tanks and some, such as the Rose, even in the bottle so now we can assess this year’s vintage. Like the famous curate’s egg it was good in parts.

The first thing is that we chose not to make any Semillon this year and only a limited amount of Chardonnay. We just weren’t terribly excited about the quality of fruit we were offered and as we made bumper quantities of the excellent 2008 we decided to use our limited tank space for other things. The modest amount of Chardonnay that we made was “gifted” to us and we are using it for a “back to the future” experiment that we’ll tell you more about it in later Newsletters.

We were generally happier with the reds though some of them posed their own challenges. The Shiraz grapes seemed to take forever for the flavour to come in so the end result is that we picked later and at much higher sugar content (Baume) than we ideally like and this is making for tricky handling. We’re taking the fermentation much slower and cooler than normal and pressed off the skins a little earlier. So far so good. The Cabernet was of good quality but whether it is up to last year’s brilliance only time will tell. It’s still a week or so until pressing so judgment is withheld. The year’s standout was a couple of tonnes of really excellent Merlot that came from a vineyard on the other side of the river. If it’s really as good as we think it is we may consider releasing a one-