Following the Viognier harvest, everyone braced themselves for a bigger day with the Merlot.  Given that we were a few pickers short the previous day, I was right on to stressing with the picking contractor that more bodies were needed to ensure that the fruit is off before the peak heat of the day.  Things did drag on into […]

The bunch sampling carried out on Monday 24th March together with impending weather lurking later in the week, all helped to convince me that harvest was to take place later that week.  The aim was to take the Viognier off on Thursday and the Merlot on Friday - much organising to be done.
First job was to find a net machine […]

The past weeks have seen weather conditions range from a run of extremely hot days and nights, rain and currently mild to warm days with cool nights.
Ten days ago when we received 25mm of rain over two days I must say I was looking for the worry beads as I had only just commenced sampling […]

Well, following on from my last post, the nets won the race but not after incurring a small amount of collateral damage.
Organising a netting contractor proved more difficult than usual.  Not because they were all busy applying nets but because they had’nt realised that things were going to get frantic, the birds would suddenly move in […]

The fact that it’s Australia Day (26th January) soon is my reminder that veraison is close, vines need to be prepared and bird nets have to be applied.
Closer inspection of the vineyard yesterday showed that since the weekend berry softening and colouring (veraison) has commenced.  What this means is that the early scouting birds are able to […]