Stefano Lubiana Diary note for March 20th, 2012
Don’t believe all that you hear. Tassie is a long way short of being a rain-sodden, windswept island that grapples with the elements at the end of the Earth.
It’s not like that at all in our part of the world. Hobart is in fact the second driest of all the capital cities in Australia. Only Adelaide has less rainfall per year than Hobart. And during our vineyard’s growing season – which spans September through to April – the long term average rainfall on our Granton property is just 340mm.
(Yackandandah – just 15km from Beechworth and its renowned Giaconda, Castagna and Savaterre Vineyards – received 324 mm in a single week at the height of this summer’s downpour over eastern Australia!)
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the shower activity which was forecast for Hobart during the past couple of days did not eventuate. Instead, we had some fantastic bright and clear autumn days, culminating with Monday’s maximum temperature peaking at 28°C. The mercury is supposed to get close to that reading again today. Wonderful settled weather that our vines above the Derwent River will simply lap up as we head towards another harvest period.
You don’t need anything more than 28°C to ensure that ripening takes place in a cool climate vineyard. It’s sunshine and photosynthesis that produce the goods we’re all looking for… flavour ripeness as well as physiological (or sugar) ripeness.
Right now, we only need a few days more and our Pinot Grigio will be ready to go as planned. Meanwhile, ex-Tropical cyclone Lua may have other ideas about that as it heads south. It is expected to bring us a bit of rain on Wednesday morning. Mind you, 10mm - 15mm shouldn’t worry us too much if that’s all we end up getting come Thursday morning. Let’s wait and see.
Our 2012 vintage team is bottling, bottling, bottling…
Gavin, Tyler and Daniel have certainly had a very laid-back introduction to vintage 2012. They even managed to enjoy a couple of lay days on the weekend. Now as they await the arrival of our next pick, there’s bottling, labelling and packaging to be done. This time, it’s the 2011 Primavera Chardonnay that’s heading for the filler.
Primavera (Italian for spring) is the label we put on our early consumption wines, and the 2011 Chardy looks very promising indeed. That’s great, because within a month or so, this wine will find itself on a good many restaurant tabletops around the country. Each vintage of Primavera sells strongly, thanks to the handiwork of our distributors around the country. And with the last stocks of the 2010 Chardonnay now in sight, the imminent arrival of its 2011 successor is exactly the news we want to hear if we can’t be involved in harvest processing.
PS Our first photos of vintage 2012 have been uploaded to our Flickr pages. You’ll find them here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefano_lubiana_wines/
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