VITICULTURE

It is often said, correctly, that great wine is actually produced in the vineyard – all the winemaker has to do is capture what is already there and put it into a bottle.  This is never more true than with Pinot noir.

In our case, we have planted three different clones of Pinot noir - all grafted onto North American rootstock to give protection from phylloxera, should that disease ever reach our region. The clones are UCD 5, UCD 6, and the Dijon clone, 115.

Our overall philosophy is to capture the very best that the Central Otago terroir can offer.  Quality drives every decision we make; cost is a secondary consideration, regardless of how much that can hurt!  Accordingly, we eschew mechanical aids in the vineyard.  Almost everything is done by hand, allowing decisions to be made on a vine by vine basis for the best health of the vine, and the best development of the few selected bunches allowed to ripen.  Everything we do in the vineyard meets the criteria of Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand.

It all starts at pruning where decisions are made for the harvest two years out.  All our vines are spur pruned (as opposed to cane pruned).  Once new growth begins in October we protect against powdery mildew using simple elemental (and totally natural) sulphur spray.  Blessed with our dry climate, that is usually the extent of our spraying regime, as other diseases endemic in less favoured regions are simply not a problem for us.  Amongst other things, this means that we can mulch our prunings and put their organic content slowly back into the soil.  In disease ridden France, for instance, all prunings must be burnt – by law!

Throughout the growing season we take special care to ensure light and warmth reaches the developing bunches by using the technique of leaf plucking.  Certainly, this is laborious, but necessary for perfection.  Also, vast numbers of bunches are typically snipped off to allow maximum flavour development in the survivors!  As a result, we aim to end up with just 6 tonnes of grapes per hectare – far below the NZ average crop size!

Growing wine “on the edge”, as we do, means that our biggest natural enemy is frost, particularly in the Spring, where young shoots are very vulnerable.  In the lowest part of our vineyard, where cold air can “pond”, we fight frost using a wind machine, which blows warm air from the inversion layer down onto the vines.  For those unfamiliar with a wind machine, it consists of a large propeller (about 4M diameter) mounted on top of a mast 10M high.  The propeller is angled to the horizon at 6°.  It is all powered by a 150HP turbocharged diesel engine, with automatic controls which start and stop the machine according to the local air temperature.  Over about 4 minutes, the propeller turns axially on top of the mast through 360°, blowing a cone of warmer air a distance of about 100M  - much like a search light beam.  It is very effective, and much cheaper than a helicopter (a large mobile fan) which some growers use.  We learnt just how effective this machine is, when, on the 28th November, 2003, the gearbox broke at the time of a moderately severe frost, and we lost 90% of our crop.  This was devastating for us, and we are still recovering financially from that loss.

At harvest, we only use hand picking so that leaf contamination is practically nil, and so that deformed or inferior bunches are simply dropped on the ground.  No machine can do that!