Tom's Back Block
July 2011
Vintage is now well and truly in the bag and we have already started bottling and releasing some of our 2011 Whites (2011 Sauvignon Blanc has already been released with some great feedback)
It was an extremely tough vintage but one where I think hard work was rewarded. A lot of our fruit this year was handpicked and that was after a lot of thinning and cleaning had already been done in the vineyard. Some of the fruit that we picked this year was the best that I have ever seen. Vintage was up to 6 weeks later than normal and we were still picking some of our whites at the end of April in Orange.
The photos show some of the handpicking of the Chardonnay and Pinot Gris. On the photo on the left you can see Mt Canobolas and the vineyard is at an altitude of 900m. The photo on the right is at our home block in Canowindra
The whites are showing good varietal flavours, although some nervous moments were spent waiting for them to fully ripen. The acids this year were extremely high, (especially with malic acid which is a little more tart than tartaric acid) so it has meant more work in the vineyard and winery to make sure that we produced wines that we are proud of. We extremely pleased with the whites and think they will be extremely well recieved in the wineshows and by you our customers.
It was great to add the Pinot Gris to our portfolio and we will give some more information in the next newsletter on the variety.
The reds have also come through and the shiraz is showing a lot of spice and white pepper. We managed to keep our reds disease free and especially with the shiraz it was because the effort that was put into the vineyard. Our reds averaged around 4-6t/ha which was after 3 fruit and 1 shoot thinning passes. The reds are now in barrel (we are just in the process of looking at all of them and starting classification) and will have a year of full rest before we get them ready for bottling.
February 2011
After returning from France in December from the freezing cold you could say the summer here has been no different!!
Here is what we got up to in France..... Gives a nice view of the countryside and shows my athleticism!!
Compared to what we have experienced over the last 7 years this has been the weather that I was used to growing up, although there has been a touch more rain. This is the weather that I promised my wife when we married in 2003 and moved here. Georgie, being one who does not like hot weather has had a fairly rough 7 years during summer!! The vineyard has been a lot of hard work but I am sure that we are going to see the benefits from it in the coming weeks during harvest.
We have had to do multiple wire lifts this year as well as shoot thinning, fruit thinning numerous times and even a little bit of leaf plucking. Combine this with the usual amount of other things happening through the season and we have had our hands full.
Vine trimming that we did in early January
We are going to commence harvest in the next couple of days which is about 45 days later than last year and we are extremely happy with the quality of fruit. We have had to be vigilant about disease and spend a lot of time in the vineyard on the tractor but think we will be rewarded for it.
Our Orange vineyards are also behind and I would image that we may still be picking some fruit towards the end of April. We are working hard with our growers to make sure that we get only the highest quality of fruit from the vineyard.
Overall we have had a daily maximum difference of about 6C from this year to the last. Next time I write hopefully we will have most of the harvest off and in barrel and we can start the work on the next vintage.
