A Winemaker's Insight into this Year's Harvest
We spoke to Matthew who gave us an update of this year's vintage.
A perfect cool summer quality vintage started on the 5th March, which is close to pre-global warming timing. Mostly cool weather promotes the development of intense fruit flavours with just enough hot days to really augment those beautiful tropical, stone fruit and dark berry flavours. Looks like all the whites and reds will come in very close together. Often we have a fortnight break between the whites and the reds but this year looks like everything will be ripe in a rush. Good chance we will have 90% picked by the end of March. One international intern this year – a great chance to work with our renowned organic winemaker David Darlow, learning some of the in-house secrets that have propelled Mount Avoca to the top of the leader board in small winery accolades. Fingers crossed the next few weeks are kind and we can get everything into tank where it is safe.
February
Supposed to be the hottest and driest month, vintage often starts late Feb in the last 20 years – was always March in the 70s-80s & 90s!
Vintage started with Chardonnay this year. Usually the Sauv Blanc wins the race to be ready first - this year the Chardonnay was a couple of days ahead. A few tricky weather events - massive scare with the bushfires around Beaufort blowing in our direction, - after a mild summer late Feb and early March have been really hot and windy. Luckily most of the smoke blew over us and having the survived a three day heat wave over the Labour day weekend we are looking forward to completing vintage with more temperate weather. David has been doing the work of three people and the vineyard has a healthy crop of super-high quality fruit.
