Saturday 14 April 2012

Stefano Lubiana 2012 Part 8

Stefano Lubiana 2012 Part 8

Diary note for April 12th, 2012

Early morning dew, lengthening afternoon shadows, and the clean, crisp bite of autumn’s night air. These are the trademark signs that April is here, and that Tasmania’s 2012 wine grape harvest is only a few weeks away from completion.

Cool autumn weather in our part of the world might not be very appealing to anyone visiting from Queensland or the Northern Territory, but in the vineyard it helps provide conditions that are ideal for the production of intensely aromatic white wines made from the Riesling.

Sure, the warm sunny days of summer bring the variety close to the optimum sugar ripeness that’s needed for winemaking, but it’s the occurrence of cooler day-time and evening temperatures at this time of the year that enables our Riesling wine grapes to retain their life-giving acidity, and develop their characteristic floral aromas.

It’s hardly surprising that wine critics like James Halliday and Huon Hooke – and even the UK’s Jancis Robinson, who visited us in February – frequently write that Tasmania produces world class Rieslings. These pale young wines have incredible intensity and vibrancy in their earliest years, and then go on to age magnificently under cool cellaring conditions.

One of the key principles of successful winemaking is that you learn to play to your strengths. That explains why a sizeable part of our Riesling crop is still out in the vineyard at the moment rather than quietly bubbling away inside the winery, alongside the 5.5 tonne parcel we picked the day before Good Friday.

We have just under 2.5ha of the variety planted on our 25ha Granton Vineyard overlooking the River Derwent. The vines were established in two separate blocks, barely 100 metres or so apart. One has a distinctly gravelly/alluvial subsoil that produces very modest yields of quite minerally Riesling. The other block is a little further up the hill, planted on lean and hungry loamy soils, and delivers fruit with clear-cut floral and citrus characters. Blended together, crops from these two different sources allow us to produce a very good quality Riesling almost every vintage.

But first, that fruit must be in the correct ripeness zone. This year, the flavours and grape sugars are moving quite slowly in our Riesling blocks, so with the weather forecasts for the next four or five days looking very encouraging, Steve and vineyard manager Mark Hoey have decided to let the variety hang out a little longer in the autumn sunshine.

The plan is to use part of this next harvest in several barrel ferments. In 2011, we made two batches in 500-litre puncheons and that worked very well indeed, adding significant weight and texture to the wine we ultimately bottled just before Christmas.

The ‘let it hang’ approach is also being applied to the 1.6ha of Merlot and 0.15ha of Nebbiolo (just four rows!) that are planted on the property. They should enjoy the 21°C, 24°C, 24°C, and 24°C maxima that the Bureau of Meteorology is predicting from now until the weekend.

Meanwhile, on the winery front, the 2012 ferments we have underway already are behaving themselves very nicely. Indeed, all of our batches of Pinot Noir can be genuinely called wine now that their ferments have come to an end. They have awesome colours!

Nearby, our barrel-fermented parcels of Chardonnay all appear to be progressing well. Malolactic fermentation – which is a second fermentation that converts the hard malic acid components of a wine into softer, smoother lactic acid ones – should follow not long after primary fermentation is completed. To make sure the job is done successfully, the barrels will be inoculated with MLF-specific yeast. There’s no rush, though. First, we need to make sure all the available grape sugars have been fermented to dryness.

That noted, our new wines will certainly need to get used to the noise that’s just begun to echo through our winery. Only a couple of metres away from the external doors on the eastern side of the building, site clearance is taking place prior to the construction of a new, purpose-built underground storage facility. A large part of the space to be created has been earmarked as a sparkling wine cave for long-term storage of our vintage and non-vintage wines.

Mid-year should see the laying of foundations for a new cellar door tasting room, 40-seat restaurant and biodynamic interpretive centre. Life is never dull at Stefano Lubiana Wines!

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/

  
Mark Smith



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