Vintage 2011

Vintage 2011

The Semillon and Verdelho

This years harvest has gone mighty well. We ended up with 2.5 tonne from the Verdelho plus 1.5 tonne of our Semillon supplemented by another 2.5 tonne from AJ.

Each of the white bins weigh about 590kg's (including the bin). The blue bin weighs over 800kg. The ute wallows like a cow with 2 bins on the back and if they shift they can make the whole back end swing out. I was driving very carefully.

The top photo shows the Semillon waiting in the winery cool room to be crushed. Our grapes are the 3 bins to the right, you can see they are quite a bit more yellow than AJ's Semillion. This is the first year that we have been able to get a crop off the Semillon so we are very excited. It turns out that Semillon is a bit of bastard to grow, one hot day and it drops its bundle. They hate to be water stressed and have weedy shoots which break easily during training.

Verdelho and Shiraz on the other hand are very hardy.

The fruit is looking much better quality than last year and we are hanging out to do a side by side comparison of the 2010 and 2011 Verdelho.

The folks at Wandin Valley who make our wine have just built a new beaut winery which is filled with awesome gear.

The last photo shows the forklift tipping a bin of Semillon into the crusher / de-stemmer.

If the Shiraz makes it through the next couple of weeks we will harvest it around Valentine's day.