Henschke End of Vintage 2012

Henschke End of Vintage 2012

With the long days of vintage behind us, but still fresh in our minds, it is now time to reflect on the 2012 vintage, which I consider to be in the top five vintages of my 35 years of winemaking.

In the lead-up to vintage, the La Niña pattern weakened, resulting in a drier, colder winter with below average rainfall, which followed through to spring with mild conditions and an early budburst. Flowering and fruit set were affected by wet, drizzly weather in Eden Valley and persistent morning fogs in the Adelaide Hills, which led to only average yields.  The summer was also surprisingly mild with below average temperatures and only two short heat events to speak of. Some cooler weather, followed by an Indian summer, provided a slow ripening period and allowed for a long window of picking, which produced intense fruit flavours, high colour figures, good acidity and mature tannins in our Eden Valley fruit. The slow ripening period in the Adelaide Hills encouraged intense fruit flavours, high natural acidity and good balance in the fruit. 

In Eden Valley the standout varieties were riesling, showing delightful aromatics, purity, intensity, excellent acidity and length of flavour, and shiraz, showing great purity, colour intensity and strikingly mature tannins. In the Adelaide Hills the standout varieties were chardonnay, showing exquisite fruit flavours, length and acidity, and pinot noir, showing excellent spice, colour intensity and mature, velvety tannins.   

Stefano Lubiana End of Vintage Report 2012

Stefano Lubiana End of Vintage Report 2012

Diary note for May 3^rd, 2012

The skies over Granton may have been dull and grey today, but our hillside vineyard is ablaze with colour at the moment, with the gold and russet tones of dying leaf canopies. It’s a signal that not only has autumn finally arrived in our part of the world, so too has the end of vintage, the 20^th that Steve and Monique have completed on their property since they moved from South Australia to Tasmania in 1990.

It’s hard to believe it was seven weeks back that vineyard manager Mark Hoey and his trusty side-kicks James and Jamie began lifting nets for the first pick of the season from our small, family-owned vineyard on the outskirts of Hobart.

Our crop that March day amounted to a touch over 6 tonnes of Chardonnay, and just a few hundred kilos of Pinot Meunier, all for sparkling wine production. It set the scene for the events what would play out during the remaining harvest period. This has been a year of fabulous fruit quality, but one that pulled up short in volume… by around 30-35% of our usual vintage crush, depending on variety.

Small bunch and berry sizes have been the cause of 2012’s drastic crop reduction. And in the case of our Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, there have been far fewer bunches than normal as well.

The colours, aromas and flavours of our newborn wines have been a joy to behold. It’s too bad our loyal customers will have limited access to them as bottles of these 2012s find their way onto wine shelves and dining tables around the country in coming years.

Blame the weather is the stock standard response you get when you ask producers right across southern Tasmania for reasons behind the vintage’s lower bunch numbers and bunch weights. But it’s hard to believe that 15 days of light rain totalling no more than 50mm for the whole month of November could have caused such disruption to flowering and fruit set. That’s farming for you!

Curiously enough, at the opposite end of the season, we had fabulous weather across our 25ha Derwent Valley site. According to the weather bods at the Bureau of Meteorology, nearby Hobart enjoyed a record warm spell during April, experiencing six days of 24ºC or better, and an average temperature for the month that was just 0.1ºC off the highest ever recorded since data collection began back in the 1890s. Whoa!

Rainfall for the month was also way down, around 40% of normal in Hobart, and just a couple of drips less than 20mm on our property above the river. Humidity levels were also pretty modest during April. All that explains why the little bit of Sauvignon Blanc we brought in a couple of days ago was as clean as a whistle and totally devoid of the botrytis we were seeking for the creation of our first sticky.

Ironic, isn’t it? As biodynamic winegrowers, we spend the whole season walking a tightrope, tempting fate and the dire consequences of disease, with no thoughts at all for the safety net of a bunch of chemicals to fall back on if things go pear-shaped. Then when we dance a little longer on the wire than necessary, willing Nature to deliver us all of the good and the evil of ‘noble rot,’ our attempts once again defy logic.

One thing that is really evident right now is how quiet the winery has become over the past few days. All our Pinot Noir and Merlot ferments have finished and the wines sent to barrel. Our whites too have gently bubbled their way through ferment, and are resting safe and sound, either in tank or barrel. Practically everything in sight has been washed down and set to one side, ready for use once again whenever the time is right next year.

We can’t believe our good fortune in having such a fantastic work crew on site this vintage. Both the vineyard and the winery ran like well-oiled machines… though there’s no doubt this year’s reduced crops meant picking and processing was much less frenetic than usual.

Winemaker assistants Gavin Robinson and Daniel Schmitt packed their kit a day or so ago and have gone off touring the State before they leave for homes in Canada and Germany, respectively. Tyler Eck has just a few more days’ work in the barrel hall and he too will be on his way, Stateside eventually, as they say.

Still, there’s plenty of jobs left for the rest of us to carry out. The biggest of them all is being undertaken by Steve, who’s worked like a Trojan in recent months to ensure everything is in readiness for the big construction program that will play out here over the remainder of 2012. A new underground barrel hall and sparkling wine cave; a new cellar door tasting room and 40-seat restaurant; a new biodynamic interpretive centre… they all seem so do-able on paper. We’re now about to see if that turns out to be the case.

An overseas vintage would be par for the course for Steve in any other year, but somehow we have a feeling that this September things might be a little too busy on home turf to allow for that. We shall see. It’s not all beer and skittles – or Pinot and skittles – this winemaking lark.

PS We’ve posted dozens of photos of vintage 2012 on our Flickr pages. You’ll find them here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefano_lubiana_wines/

  

Mark Smith

Stefano Lubiana Vintage Report Part 9

Stefano Lubiana Vintage Report Part 9

Diary note for April 24^th, 2012

Australia’s wine industry may not have the hallowed history of northern Europe’s wine regions, but it surely has something else about it that’s very special: relative freedom from bureaucratic regulation, and the capacity to grow and make wines according to individual producer preferences.

Bottle-fermented sparkling wine from Nebbiolo? Sure thing. Barrel-fermented Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio? Why not? Late harvest Sauvignon Blanc? Yep, let’s give that a try.

For fifth-generation winemaker Steve Lubiana, that’s the joy of setting up business in Tasmania’s cool climate, Derwent Valley. You can do just about whatever you like when it comes to growing and making wine in these parts. Much more than would have been the case had grandfather Andrea Lubiana remained in Trieste 70 years ago and watched Steve being brought up making wine in the Italian industry.

All of the afore-mentioned winemaking options are now a part of the fabric that will be woven into the 2012 wines from Stefano Lubiana.

What a rollercoaster ride vintage has been for Steve and Monique: a cold and wet winter and spring; early budburst; unsettled weather during flowering; and a summer that held lots of promise weather-wise, but didn’t quite deliver the uninterrupted run of sunny days and high temperatures that the north of the State experienced in 2012.

That said, we’ve had an outstanding if somewhat unseasonal harvest period. Rainfall in Hobart during March was only 68 percent that of the city’s long-term average. Meanwhile, newspaper reports in The Mercury late last week noted that the average maximum temperature so far this April has been a whopping four degrees above normal. Wow! That’s extraordinary!

Extraordinary just might end up being the key word to describe the wines of 2012. With only a few dozen rows of fruit still hanging out in the vineyard, our crush to date has been anything but ordinary. We’ve vinified close to two-thirds the volume of fruit that went through the winery in 2011 and 2010.

And as the small parcels of fruit we’ve picked and processed this year gradually morph into 2012 wine, we’re becoming more and more convinced that this will become a memorable vintage for premium quality. Indeed, the dies have now been cast for a small number of very distinctive ‘super premium’ wines.

Of course, there’s an old saying that’s just as relevant today as it was hundreds of years ago: “there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip…”

Having great fruit is one thing. Turning it into great wine and getting it safely into bottle is an entirely different matter.

One thing that is certain right now is that we have had a fantastic work crew on site this vintage. Our ‘blow-in’ winemakers may have come from different parts of the globe, but they all arrived here with similar aspirations for quality… and they have delivered that, day in, day out, without even batting an eyelid.

It will be a pity to see them leave in a few weeks’ time. They’ve become an integral part of what has been a very smooth and highly efficient processing operation during the past two months. Besides, you wouldn’t meet a nicer bunch of young winemakers anywhere else on the planet.

Vintage activities can become a bit fraught at times when they’re conducted under pressure, but there’s been no evidence of that at all during 2012. That’s very important when you’re a small, family-owned company. You get only one shot at vintage each year, and you have to make sure that you’re operating at optimum performance levels whenever you’re on site and doing the business.

On the face of it, this week looks like being a relatively quiet time around our Granton Vineyard. Mark, James and Jamie still have a little bit of fruit to keep their eyes on, but for the most part their days will be consumed by putting away the kilometres of nets that have come off our vines. And of course, there are those dopey ‘Babydoll Southdown’ sheep to round up and move on to their next vineyard block. (What was it that WC Fields said? Never work with children or animals?)

Tomorrow, there’ll the opportunity to have ‘a few quiet ones’ to help mark the passing of ANZAC Day, not to mention the last remaining week or two of vintage 2012. Lest we forget.

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

The vintage team eating the ferment

The vintage team looking at the ferment

Mario Lubiana

De Bortoli End of Vintage Report 2012

De Bortoli End of Vintage Report 2012

2012 Yarra Valley and King Valley Vintage Report

Yarra Valley

Cool growing conditions, good rainfall with a few dry periods, cool nights through the important January and February period. Cropping levels were down 25% from normal. Bunches and berries were small and in the case of red very high in colour.

Earlier than expected harvest, perhaps due to low crops. We started our Yarra Valley harvest with hand-picked Chardonnay and Pinot Noir on the 16th February. This is about a week earlier than normal, if there is such a thing!

Chardonnay is seriously good and many are saying it will be as good as the 2011 vintage, albeit a slightly riper season.

We were concerned that Pinot Noir was a little too big and dense in style early, but post MLF the wines have lighted off substantially and have very good perfume. It may not be quite as good as the 2010 vintage, but the wines will have many salivating at their density, colour and drinkability.

The best of the Syrah’s will also be outstanding with most vineyards showing classic ripeness and juiciness with white pepper and graphite characters. The tannins from whole bunches are pretty exciting.

Sarah Fagan has some cracking components of Riesling, Gewurz and Pinot Gris bubbling away. It may be the year for some slightly higher residuals in these aromatic wines.

We have had a real focus this year on Cabernet Sauvignon and the wines all look promising. 2012 will be the best Cabernet year since 2006 with good ripeness and density, lovely varietal leafy notes and quite fine tannin. It is very early days as many of the wines are still macerating on skins, but we are just a little excited.

Of the ‘alternate’ varieties, Sangiovese from some young Yarra plantings is looking quite drinkable as is our second harvest of the single vineyard Roundstone Gamay Noir.

The 2012 autumn in the Yarra has been one of the most beautiful and colourful in many years. It reminds us of the classic 2005 and 2002 autumns that were both fab years. Fingers crossed.

King Valley

Wonderful growing conditions through to the last couple of days of February; cool days and cool nights producing lots of aromatics in most of the white varieties.

The first few days into early March dumped 240mm of rain, making Shiraz very difficult. The following 5 weeks were like an Indian summer saving the red vintage.

Pinot Grigio and Vermentino are quite aromatic from the cooler conditions. Vermentino continues to impress and will be very important to our future in the King Valley.

Moscato Giallo is outrageously pungent and has produced a very exciting first up 5.5% frizzante style similar to Moscato d’Asti. 5.5% almost sounds like a health drink!

After some savage crop thinning, Sangiovese and Tempranillo are showing their own and will be important in our Bellariva and DB Reserve brands.

Merlot is the highlight of the reds. Beautiful juicy, plump, red and dark fruits, a little savoury and quite delicious. Classic Bellariva red. 

Cabernet loved the late heat of autumn to produce some solid classic Cabernet for Deen and DB blending.

Stefano Lubiana 2012 Part 8

Stefano Lubiana 2012 Part 8

Diary note for April 12^th, 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

Henschke Hill of Grace Vintage Report

Henschke Hill of Grace Vintage Report 

Last week we picked the Hill of Grace vineyard which also coincided with the release of our 2007 Hill of Grace – this release marks the 50^th vintage since the first release of this iconic wine in 1958. This historic vineyard is named after the Gnadenberg church  (translates to Hill of Grace) which oversees this beautiful site. The first section of this vineyard, which we call the Grandfather block, was planted in 1860 by pioneer ancestor, Nicolaus Stanitzki. When the Henschke family donated the land for the Gnadenberg Church, Nicolaus planted the vineyard and the local villagers help build the church. For nearly a 100 years, from 1860 to the 1950s the fruit went into claret, burgundy and port which was the ‘everyday’ wine of the villagers. Wines were bottled from the vineyard before 1958 but were never labelled or released and it wasn’t until Cyril Henschke saw the merit in producing single vineyard wines with his success of the Mount Edelstone shiraz, that the first bottle of Hill of Grace was released in 1958. 

The Hill of Grace vineyard is an intricate carpet of plots which consists of the House block shiraz planted in 1951, the Church block planted in 1952, the Windmill block planted in 1956 and Post Office block 1,2 & 3 which were planted respectively in 1910, 1965 and 1989. Each plot contributes to the unique character of the Hill of Grace wine.

The Hill of Grace vineyard is always picked close to the full moon of Easter and this year was no exception.  The fruit quality was excellent with lots of the trademark spice flavours, acidity and ripe tannins and we had cool mild weather leading up to perfect picking conditions.  The 2012 Hill of Grace is certainly one to look out for when it is released in the years to come!

2012 harvest of the Hill of Grace vineyard – photograph Dragan Radocaj

Picking the post office block – 2012

photograph Dragan Radocaj