So, how do you get it right with your first ever Chardonnay vintage? We don’t know how our inaugural Chardonnay will shape up, but the early signs are very encouraging. The grapes were harvested on 12 February and crushed the same day. Half the vintage is in stainless steel vats and the other half in a rotation through new and older American oak hogsheads to create a perfectly balanced, flavoursome Chardonnay which is fruity and fresh on the palate with […]
Today we have bottled our 2018 single-estate Cabernet Rosé and are delighted with the result. Everything went smoothly at the mobile bottling plant at Robert Stein Winery and the wine is now safely bottled, labelled and screw-capped, and packed into cartons on pallets. After the wine gets over bottle shock and returns to full flavour and balance over the next 6 weeks, we will be releasing our 2018 Red Dog Rosé in time for the warmer months. Colour is an […]
As devotees of the ocean and seascapes, Eastern Sardinia is somewhere we had always wanted to visit. With southern Burgundy experiencing the wettest spring on record, we decided to head south to Sardinia for some warmer weather and a chance to find some sunshine in a bottle or two. We had heard about the Italian white wine Vermentino but never sampled it. After a few days exploring Sardinia’s spectacular east coast national Park which extends north from Santa Maria Navarese, […]
This year, drought conditions meant that many of our olive trees hunkered down and didn’t deliver much fruit and we are hopeful for better conditions next season. But our few Manzanillo olive trees did prosper so we have hand-picked a about two hundred kilos over the past week and are now busy salting them down to remove any impurities and get them ready for pickling. As in every olive grove there are a few rogue varieties amongst our Frantoio and […]
We have just landed back in Mudgee after 5 weeks exploring the huge wine-growing region of Southern Burgundy, France, in our quest to find the perfect French Chardonnay. Our quest was sparked by the fact that this year we are making our first single-vineyard Chardonnay and we were looking for fresh inspiration to bring to the table. We spent many productive days meeting French winemakers, sampling the best on offer and learning how many French vignerons are now embracing biodynamic […]
What a challenging summer we have had this year! Fortunately, no bush fires (a miracle), but unrelenting heat each day, with only some respite provided by cooler evenings. But virtually no rain at all between October and late March. While many of our neighbours’ dams dried up completely we were lucky to have 7 good dams to provide some irrigation water for the vineyard. The dry conditions brought birdlife in unprecedented numbers from further west, meaning we had to net […]
