Hello Everybody, Margaret River calling……
The weather is good, the vintage is finished and I’m in front of the spreadsheets, at least for a day or so. Yes, they don’t make better wine as such, but they sure help you when the chips are down. Working at Seppelts Great Western in the early ‘80’s and we had a state-of-the- art system running under the Pick operating system on a VAX machine in Adelaide (this museum snippet is for anyone in IT). It was ground-breaking for a winery: I remember John Brown coming down from Milawa and asking me that same question. Those days I had to say it did because we had such an arcane paper-based system that you never really knew where you were and keeping the thing up to date became an end in itself.
Well…we are working on some Tempranillo at present and below are a couple of shots from the vintage. Here is our Tempranillo exposing itself after two weeks under inert conditions. Hand picked into double food grade bags with a small helping of fermenting wine (to make carbon dioxide and purge out oxygen, our enemy) – it really looks great.
Here’s a bunch; it’s a hell of a bunch is it not? To taste them after carbonic maceration is to bite on a fizzy fruit tingle and if you zoom in on the photo they mostly all have a little parabolic indentation like the death star – you get what I mean. Whatever significance that is I don’t know but it sounds really good.
We crushed this up and then let it ferment to dryness. Most interesting was that it had fermented intracellularly almost one third of the available sugar already – I was surprised by that.
What an interesting wine it is. Deeply coloured but with a striking aromatic / earthy primary aroma with a soft luxurious and fleshy palate. The trick now is how and where I’m going to use it – it won’t be by computer!
These sorts of trials are not without risk of spoilage and it’s a fair commitment in time and energy, but it seems to have paid off. I always like to do a trial on a reasonable scale (a few tonnes at least) to put it to a winemaker’s advantage – with risk comes reward, yes?
And to celebrate the end of Vintage 2018, here is a traditional end of vintage BBQ with traditional vine cuttings!
Over and out,
Brian
