What a wild ride it's been over the last few weeks!
We were very excited to win two trophies at the Riverland Wine Show recently. Our 919 Classic Topaque took out the Stewards' Choice trophy (like the Packing Room Award at the Archibald Prize). The stewards obviously love its complexity, sweetness and its plush texture. Thank you stewards!
We were awarded Best Organic/Biodynamic Wine of Show for our 919 Reserve 2023 Touriga Nacional. This is a red wine from the Portuguese variety Touriga Nacional, which is 23 years old, grows in our Glossop vineyard and produces excellent wines of great tannin structure, massive flavours of sweet and sour cherries, and a crisp finish. The variety ages well, throwing a "crust" (or deposit) on the bottle at about 2-3 years of age as it mellows, and maturing into a deep liquorice flavour at about 8 to 10 years.
This patch of vines has produced five trophies over the last few years, but sadly we lost the entire patch to repeated deep frost only days beforehand. We had a frost on the Friday night after Antarctic winds brought up a mass of freezing air from the south. It took out the shoots and primary buds from all of the Touriga Nacional, Durif patch B and two rows of Tempranillo. Over the weekend the vines started to push out new growth from the secondary buds, however a second frost on the Monday night killed this new growth, and took out the remainder of the Glossop vineyard. It also severely damaged our Loxton vineyard, killing our newly planted vines and taking out all our specialist varieties except the Durif. Our commercial plantings of Chardonnay and Shiraz were saved due to Eric's vigil through the long cold nights and implementation of the frost mitigation system.
A couple of weeks on we are starting to see the full extent of the loss. We will get fruit from 2 ½ rows of Durif at Glossop, and the older patch of Durif at Loxton. We will get a small harvest of Palomino from Glossop for our Pale Dry Apera. The Loxton vineyard will give us Ella Semmler's Orchard Chardonnay and Shiraz, and material for our Latin Collection Rhumba Ruby. We will have to replant young vines, and undertake a second remedial pruning on our badly damaged vines on both vineyards. Our Touriga Nacional is so badly damaged we will have to cut them down at the trunk and re-train cordons onto the trellis, and perhaps re-plant some vines.
Consequently, we will have very few 2025 wines available, and a light 2026 vintage for some varieties.
Spare a thought for all the growers, including our neighbours, who do not have a winery of their own. They too have lost 1-2 years of harvest, and have no fall-back. The event was so widespread it has affected huge areas of agriculture and horticulture from Griffith to mid-Victoria to southern South Australia, including wheat, animal fodder, fruits, nuts and grapes.
It has been difficult to process this, emotionally and business-wise, however as time moves on we are optimistic over the opportunities this particular challenge may present us in the future. We are great believers that challenges are there to make us find new ways of doing things.
Here's to the challenge of making great wine!
The damage on the Touriga Nacional
