Stefano Lubiana 2012 Part 7
Diary note for April 4th, 2012
Easter beckons, but first there is picking to be done. Today, with bright sunshine and 26°C forecast, we’re bringing in Sauvignon Blanc from our meagre 1.3ha plantings of this polarising wine grape.
Regardless of whether you believe the variety is a noble savage or an ignoble savage, we’re pleased to be able to get its fruit off in such great shape, and four days ahead of the picking date we achieved in the cooler, cloudier vintage of 2011.
Barely a month ago, we were finding ripening to be something of a slow, painful process on our Derwent Valley site. But, of course, Mother Nature has since decided to come to the party, as she usually does around this time of year.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, nearby Hobart was around half a degree warmer than average during March. However, while the city’s total monthly rainfall was just 68 percent of normal, we also experienced a cold snap on the 23rd and 24th that brought snow to Mount Wellington. Our vines must’ve been out to lunch those days!
On the winery front, our vintage team has shrugged off news that this year’s Pinot Noir crop is the lowest we’ve had to work with since 2003. Yesterday we saw the first real signs of life in our open fermentation vats. Clearly, we’ve now got several wild ferments of Pinot Noir well and truly underway. With any luck, they’ll each hit 30°C very and soon afterwards it be ‘all over, red rover’ for those busy yeast colonies.
Our colour extraction looks phenomenal this year, and there have been no errant whiffs of VA or anything else suspicious.
“If only could you bottle that smell!” noted Napa Valley wine writer Sally James as she dropped by the winery yesterday on her brief Tasmanian odyssey.
The more we see of this year’s juices, the more we’re inclined to say the wines of 2012 are likely to be among the best we’ve produced. All we need is a little more of that fine, settled weather we had in late March and we should be sitting pretty in a couple of weeks.
Today’s Savvy pick is scheduled to be followed by a Riesling pick tomorrow, the day before Good Friday. A smallish proportion of those harvests will be barrel-fermented and aged for a while in French oak puncheons.
These hold 500 litres, and will enable our aromatic whites to build structure and texture without allowing the wood to ride roughshod over their fruit aromas and flavours. Some of last month’s Pinot Grigio is already is puncheon and about to begin ferment.
Easter now looks set to be harvest-free, before we wind up vintage with some tiny amounts of Merlot and Nebbiolo in a few more weeks.
Nebbiolo, you say? Yep, that’s right.
Officially, we have 0.15ha of this wonderful Italian red on the property. In reality, it’s just a handful of rows that in 2011 produced little more than a tonne of fruit… for sparkling wine production, would you believe?
Steve’s a big fan of the ‘metodo classico’ sparkling wines of Franciacorta, in Italy’s alpine Valtellina. There, the good folk of Lombardy refer to the variety as Chiavennasca.
Steve is always up for a challenge, and the Tasmanian industry could certainly do with something that’s a bit different in the premium sparkling wine segment. Presently, it’s dominated by numerous blends of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
On the downside, there’s one less challenge we’d like to face right now. Further up the Derwent Valley, some of the local landholders and small forestry operations there have begun their autumn burn-offs. The prospect of smoke-tainted fruit is not something we’d like to contemplate right now, given the vintage shortfall we’ve already experienced in 2012.
The wine industry’s peak body Wine Tasmania is keen to negotiate a moratorium on burning off until vintage is over. It doesn’t seem too much to ask that a quality-driven industry that is making a positive contribution to brand Tasmania should get a little preferential treatment for just a few more weeks of April.
We live in hope.
PS We’ve continued posting photos of vintage 2012 on our Flickr pages. You’ll find them here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefano_lubiana_wines/
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