The Numbers Game

NZ Winegrowers have just released their Statistical Annual 2008. 50 pages of facts and figures - here are just a few I thought were interesting.

1. Half of all vineyards in NZ are Sauvignon Blanc, about 14000ha and is still growing. The next largest is Pinot Noir with 4650ha, then Chardonnay 3881, with everything else a tiny 1380ha or less. Playing to our strengths or having most of our eggs in the same basket??

2. Just over half of all vineyards in NZ are located in Marlborough. No surprise there I guess.

3. The average cropping level is practically 10 tonnes per hectare !! Surely overcropping for a cool climate region. Blame Sauvignon Blanc and wonder how much better could we be if we tried.

4. Of the nearly 30000 hectares of vineyards in NZ only 917 is Riesling. This seems ridiculously small for a country whose terroir is practically tailor-made for the variety. Even Pinot Gris has overtaken it at 1383ha.

5. NZ has 585 wineries and 90% are small (less than 200000L production).

6. Waipara is NZs fastest growing wine region. No major growth in Central Otago is forecast for the few years.

7. People in New Zealand drink on average only 1 glass of wine per week (approx 11L a year). Really ? Not in my house.

You can pore through the report yourself here.

Frosty Reception

At the tail end of last week a storm swept up the South Island brigning rain, sleet and snow to all areas. And it wasnt only the peloton in the Tour of Southland who were affected by the snow. Vineyards across the island were also struck by the freak weather.

In Central Otago the vineyards had helicopters on standby all mornings from Wednesday to Saturday. It was much the same across the rest of the island. Temperatures plummeted to 0C and below on all of those mornings, the lowest being -2.6C in our Gibbston Valley vineyard on Saturday. Newspapers reported that 500 helicopters were working in vineyards across the country that night. Check out the TV3 news video here.

I was up in Waipara on Friday night/Saturday morning with a helicopter on site. Temperatures in the vineyard went from 7C at midnight down to around 0C by 6am but soon warmed up with daybreak and the only thing lost was a nights sleep.

Helicopters are expensive to run. Depending on its size and the area of vineyard you want to protect, the hourly rate can be anything from $600-$3000. Which is enough to give any vineyard owner sleepless nights but is better than the stress of losing your entire crop (and hence income) in a single night.

You can read a little more in a newspaper report Here. The net result for Sandihurst is that we have lost our West Melton fruit - two good Riesling vineyards (potentially 20 tonnes) and our Pinot Gris (5 tonnes). Its disappointing but on the plus side, our vineyards in Waipara, Marlborough and Central have been unaffected. The forecast this week is for fine weather and surely this spells the end of the frost risk this year.

And the winner is....

A man with a 1000 bottle wine cellar at his home has defeated a man who rarely drinks at all and is about to replace a man who gave up drinking because it was getting the better of him. Sounds like a good result all round then.

Did you know that only American wine is allowed to be served at the Whitehouse. Find out how much you know about wine and US politics by taking the Whitehouse Wine Quiz here.

Springtime in Central

Heres a photo taken this morning in Queenstown, Central Otago. Springtime. Not that unusual but not exactly welcome either. No reported vineyard damage at this stage. Temperatures overnight got down as low as 0.8C and havent risen much over 5.0C all day. Brrrrrr.

Keeping an eye out

While we are always in contact with our growers in other regions its good to be able to keep a handle on the season generally just to get an idea of how things are going. Webcams and Vineyard Weather stations are an ideal way to do this from afar.

Regional Webcams

Central Otago - Lake Wanaka, Clyde, Alexandra, Queenstown

Weather Stations

These are from the excellent site harvest.com and have the added advantage of calaculating GDD as well as temperature, rainfall, wind and humidity.

Central Otago - Brennan location of our PinotNoir

Marlborough - St Lukes our Sauvignon Blanc vineyard.

Waipara - Huxley, Camshorn on the valley floor, Omihi to the north, or Muddy Water on the hillside.

Rain Radars

Elders and MetService have very good hourly radars that we can use to track bad weather.

Marlborough and Sauvignon Blanc

The secret ingredient for great world beating Sauvignon Blanc, according to the video above, is Marlborough. In other words its all about TERROIR. It always is.

Mon Dieu ! Quel Horreur !

Chaos in the French wine industry with what looks like some mad ideas being debated about the advertising and sale of wine in France. Quite naturally the local winemakers and growers have taken to the streets in protest.

The demonstrators were drawing attention to the censorship of wine in the press, the proposed tax raises on wine, the ban on wine advertising on the internet, and the possible banning of free wine tastings to the public. Decanter has more on it here and here.

All quiet here in NZ where tastings are most often free or if charged for, are refundable upon purchase of any wine. And advertising on the internet or newspaper is not restricted at all.

Growth Industry

We can see the fruit ! Uniform growth and practically 2 bunches on every shoot. Next job in the vineyard will be to think about shoot thinning where things look a little crowded. Thinning helps limit the crop and open up the canopy to light and wind flow which helps ripening and to reduce disease pressure.

In a few weeks we will begin to see flowering and fruit-set take place. NZ's national weather bureau have just issued a prediction of a warmer and drier than average summer. Which would be great news but can they be trusted ?

Grape Expectations...

Its that time of year when we as a winery are out visiting our growers, taking a look at the vineyards to see how the current season has begun, and also reviewing the previous season - how the grapes were, things that could be improved from both sides and a look at the pricing structure.

With regards to pricing generally, it is amazing how random it all seems to be. Most people seem to plump for a figure somewhere near last years prices with a small increase factored in, with perhaps a premium added in cases where vineyards are perceived to have a high quality terroir or for grape varietals that are in high current demand. There seems to be very little knowledge of how those prices were first arrived at and little or no discussion about how they relate to the operating costs of a vineyard.

Most growers are paid by the tonne. Some also have an incremental scale based on ripeness or other such quality parameters. Another system not used often in NZ but which seems to approximate the current grape prices well is the 100 x bottle price formula. A few growers are involved in profit-sharing schemes with the wineries. Some wineries opt to lease the vineyard outright.

No doubt the Economists would tell us its all simple demand and supply - Pinot Noir often sells for twice the price of Riesling so growers shouldnt expect the same prices for their fruit despite the fact that all the good ones will spend exactly the same amount of time in the vineyard on both varietals.

Life isnt fair sometimes (if you grow/love Riesling!)

Waipara - late October

Back to work. Here's a photograph looking across the Waipara Valley. Waipara is New Zealands fastest growing premium wine region and is home to some of the country's best Pinot Noirs and Rieslings. It offers a wide array of terroirs with soil types ranging from the clay and limestone hills to the loess/gravel valley floor. Although only 50 kilometres north of Christchurch it is generally 2C warmer, largely due to the protective influence of the hills in the photograph above which shelter the valley from the cool Easterly wind coming off the Pacific ocean directly on the other side. There are around 80 vineyards and a dozen wineries in the region and the number grows every year. Large scale recent investment from the big wine companies in New Zealand is a real vote of confidence and has raised the profile greatly both here and abroad. The infrastructure in the local town of Amberley is steadily growing but it still remains a quintessential NZ farming town.

At Sandihurst we grow our fruit at 3 vineyards in Waipara. Williams Hill, Bellbird Spring and Georges Road. Pinot Noir, Riesling and Pinot Gris are the varietals. And while we don't want to put the Commentators Curse on it, with the frost and flowering periods not yet over - the 2008-09 season has started so well people are beginning to say they cant remember a start like it. Long may it continue.

Labour Day...anything but

A public holiday in New Zealand today, its Labour Day and so its all about NOT working. We headed for the beach. Roll on Summer...

In the Vineyard again...

Following on from bud burst around the end of September/start of October depending on where your vineyard is, the vine has dodged a couple of frost scares and the new shoots now seem to be happily growing bigger each day. Looking across the vineyard there is a picturesque sea of green. At this stage of the season each shoot has between 3-5 leaves unfolded and you can now see the inflorescence's on each shoot (mostly 2 per shoot). All going to plan, these inflorescence's will swell, flower, and set fruit before the year is out.

Even now we can get a rough guide to the potential crop by looking at the average number of inflorescence's on each vine and applying a bunch weight guesstimate based on the historical data of the vineyard. The major variable in the equation is the weather over the flowering period which plays a big part in the number of berries that set on each bunch , and therefore the potential crop size.

When the Merde hits the fan...

Following in the footsteps of wines like Cats Pee on a Gooseberry Bush or Fat Bastard comes this Rose wine from the Languedoc region of France. Apparently not 'merde' at all and 7 Euros to boot, it seems to be another marketing/labelling stunt that has met with success. You can watch some BBC footage of it here.

Its not the first time the use of 'Merde' has appeared in relation to French wine. British writer Anthony Hanson once famously wrote that 'Great Burgundy smells of shit'. And in another classic incident a Lyon magazine was ordered to pay £200,000 in damages to a group of 56 co-operatives in the Beaujolais region when they quoted the opinion of François Mauss, president of the Grand Jury of European Wine Tasters who said of Beaujolais 'C'est un vin de merde.'

A bientot

Thats my boy !

Heres my son Thomas doing his bit during our recent party for the launch of our 2008 Sauvignon Blanc. He loved it...but hes more of a Riesling man, just like his father.

The Bud Brush...

Its about now that one of the more tedious and strenuous vineyard jobs takes place. Its bud rubbing - the removal of unwanted buds/shoots that grow on the trunk from the head of the vine to the base. Normally this is a job that is the very definition of 'back-breaking'. Its a job that is almost always done manually and bending over every 1.5 metres 3 or 4000 times in every hectare can mean long tiring days and exhausted nights.

People mostly use some sort of glove with a rough surface, secateurs or just bare hands but now it seems some bright spark has invented a tool that looks like a cross between a toilet brush and an oversized toothbrush but which might actually be quite useful. At only NZD$26.50 we would be mad not to try it. Apparently they are selling like hotcakes in the USA. It seems too easy, its a wonder it hasnt been produced before.

Results to follow...

Glass half full....

At Sandihurst we are trialling, in conjunction with Lincoln University and MetaNZ, the use of recycled crushed glass as a reflective undervine mulch. The trial is being conducted in our Pinot Noir vineyard and is now in its second year. The trial is comparing Green glass, White glass, Mussel Shells and a Control area of vines without any mulch. Mussel shells have been used to good effect in previous trials at Neudorf vineyard in Nelson. You can get a little more detail about that here.

The benefits of using a reflective undervine surface are many and may especially help vineyards or varietals that are in marginal areas. The glass/shells act to reflect light and heat back into the canopy of the vine. The raises the temperature around the fruiting zone and may have an effect on photosynthetic rates and vine phenology. More light evenly spread around the cluster may also help even ripening and promote a more mature level of phenolic (tannin) development in the berry without pushing the sugar levels too high. Berry colour is also improved. Below the vine surface the mulches may also help to raise soil temperature and have positive effects on vine root development and as an added bonus helps limits weed growth too.

Initial tasting of wines made from the trial blocks were sensational to say the least. Where the control block came over as quite thin and with higher levels of green tannin, the glass/shell vines had an obvious depth of mid palate weight to them as well as excellent tannin structure and darker colour. The difference was chalk and cheese, from vines only metres apart of each other.

The Sandihurst trial has great potential as it combines all the known benefits of undervine mulch with the use of recycled glass, in itself a major issue for recycling companies in New Zealand. Its very exciting. The glass has been colour separated and arrives to us in 1 tonne lots. Amazingly there are no sharp edges in the crushed glass.

Stay tuned for more results as the trial continues...

Our day in the sun...

Last Sunday saw the inaugural Sandihurst Sauvignon Blanc Launch Party take place. It was a great success and close to 250 people attended the event which was held at the winery. The weather was brilliant and everyone seemed to have a great time sprawled out on the lawn in the sun, drinking our wines and listening to the live Jazz band. A local restaurant, Langdale, were also on hand with some great food.

People received a complementary glass of our 2008 Sauvignon Blanc upon arrival together with a food match by Langdale (a delicious Prawn Croquette) and could then sample through the range of our other wines, which included another new release - our 2007 Central Otago Pinot Noir.

All in all it was such a success it looks like we will have to make it an annual event.

Nipped in the bud...

This is moderate frost damage. The spurs either side of the middle one seem to be OK and healthy but you can see in the middle spur the shoot tips and leaves have been hit. This shoot probably wont make it. No leaves remain to photosynthesize and the tip is ruined so wont grow any longer. A secondary bud may emerge but it is already well behind the remaining healthy shoots so will probably have to be removed or will end up as an unripe bunch in the harvest.

Mother Nature meets Jack Frost

From far away, YESTERDAY, this vineyard looks great. THIS MORNING, upon closer inspection, it looks less than great. Temperatures in West Melton plummeted overnight to a low of -3.0 which, despite some desperate helicopter action, may well have caused up to 50% of the shoot growth to die.

Some shoots will recover and secondary buds will grow so it isnt all over just yet. Barring another whiteout there will still be a crop here but it will certainly be a smaller crop. And the season now just got shorter for the new growth so we will need it to be a better than average one just to get the full potential out of this fruit. The margin for error in the season just got tighter.

Better news from our other vineyards - no frost issues to date for our Central Otago, Marlborough or Waipara vineyards. Spring Frosts are a major issue on the New Zealand wine industry. The price of protection is huge but the price of total crop loss is worse.

Riesling Rules !

I have just received my free copy of “Riesling Rules”, all the way from the USA. Its published by Pacific Rim Winemakers (but you would hardly know it) who are really leading the charge in helping everyones favourite white varietal get the exposure and limelight it deserves.

This book is 40 pages of Riesling facts, lists and snippets, laced with quotes and tips that keep things light and approachable. ”How to Sound Like a Riesling Geek” is tucked in after some pretty decent information about Riesling Growing Regions, lists of key Mosel and Alsace producers.

Whether you’re already a Riesling aficionado, or just cannot quite figure out why everyone keeps telling you that you should like Riesling, or somewhere in between — this booklet will hold your interest.

“Riesling Rules” is available free — you can view it online here or order a hard copy online.

To quote the rulebook;

The true triumph of Riesling is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it. – Voltaire

New Release...

At Sandihurst we are about to release out first wine of the 2008 vintage - our 2008 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.

2/3 of the fruit is from the Wairau Valley and was 'traditionally' handled (in the Marlborough sense) - machine harvested, clean juice and cool fermented to retain aromatics and freshness. The other 1/3 of fruit is from the Awatere Valley, hand harvested, whole bunch pressed and briefly settled before being fermented slightly warmer. Both wines then stayed on full fermentation lees for 3 months to build texture and palate weight before being blended and bottled in August.

The wine is typically Marlborough in style but is understated and restrained. Rather than a straight forward fruit bomb the wine offers texture and additional complexity which adds another dimension to the fruit aromatics and vibrant acidity. It is dry at 3 g/L residual sugar. This is a wine which will benefit from short to mid-term cellaring and should begin to bloom into 2009 as it develops in the bottle.

To celebrate the release Sandihurst is having an afternoon release party on Sunday October 12th. Live music, picnic food and of course a complementary glass of Sauvignon Blanc on our vineyard lawn. Please contact the winery for further details.

At this moment in time...

Here's the inside of the winery and here, at the beginning of October, is the current state of things.

140 barrels of Pinot Noir, 3/4 from Central Otago, 1/4 from Waipara, are all going through Malolactic fermentation at the moment. Yesterday I sent a number of samples to the local hospital who provide a lab service for checking the MLF numbers. I'm hoping most barrels are nearly through.

In the background you can see our tanks. We have about 500L of 2008 Canterbury Pinot Gris which is in tank sitting on light lees. Its really starting to build some texture and develop interesting character over and above the fruit.

Same deal with our 2008 Central Otago Gewurztraminer. About 1000L on lees. A rich full bodied wine which is tending towards Alsace in its style. A little residual sugar, about 14% alcohol and with serious weight behind it.

The other tanks are all Riesling. We have our 2008 Waipara Riesling, about 2500L, which was fermented entirely with natural yeasts and is currently still sitting on full fermentation lees. Ferment stopped naturally at about 25g/L sugar which is wonderfully balanced with its acidity.
My plan at this stage is that this wine will not be cold stabilised or fined in order to keep the wine as natural as possible.

Our other Riesling is our 2008 Canterbury Riesling of which there will be around 19000L. Its made in a lower alcohol (probably around 10-11%) style with around 25-30g/L sugar. The wine actually tastes much drier than it is due to the higher levels of acidity we retain here in Canterbury. On light lees at the moment. Should be a real winner.

Outside most buds are now out and budburst seems relatively uniform with between 1-3 leaves unfolded. No frost issues to date. Everything looking as good as possible at this early stage.

The Road is Long...

The Great Alpine Highway runs from Christchurch to the Kumara Junction on the West Coast. Its the driving equivalent of the world famous Tranz-alpine train journey. 255km long and packed with spectacular scenery on both sides of the Southern Alps.

Sandihurst Winery is located about 15kms from the start of the highway on the Christchurch side, just past the small settlement of West Melton. Its the only winery on the whole route and, if you are travelling west, quite probably the last winery you will see before getting to Central Otago, about 750kms down the road !

So dont forget to stop in. You've been warned !

Incroyable !

It appears from the video above that the French people know next to nothing about New Zealand wines. Shame on them. And you might think that people involved in the wine industry would be a little more knowledgeable. Incredible.

Well hopefully that all about to change because Sandihurst will shortly begin exporting some wine to France. No excuses now.

The envelope please...

The results are in from the International Wine and Spirit Competition. We entered 3 of our wines and the good news for us is that they all received an award.

The 2006 Canterbury Riesling was awarded Silver-Best in Class. Here what the judges had to say about it.
Greenish straw colour, showing minerality on the nose with slate and grapefruit pungency. Good fruit concentration, yet much delicacy. The palate is round, crisp, softened by residual sugar which is well balanced by delicate, mouthwatering acidity and gentle flavours. Very refined.

The 2006 Canterbury Pinot Noir was awarded Silver-Best in Class.
Light glossy garnet red. Gentle soft red berried fruits ,light floral notes. Clean soft and ripe in the mouth, delicate pinot character with some weight, fresh and just a bit warm on the finish.

The 2007 Nelson Riesling was awarded Bronze.

It is interesting to chart the recent competition results and tasting feedback. As a rough rule it appears that Sandihurst tends to do better in competitons outside NZ than we do in this country. Why is this? One reason may be partly due to my winemaking style which has been largely influenced by my time living in Germany and in conversation with other European winemakers.

Another noticeable trend is that our wines dont tend to show very well in the first year after bottling. They take a while to settle and develop. Im comfortable with that, they arent built to be fruit bombs, but hopefully to offer added complexity and interest as they develop. I think our wines have great ageing potential. Which, especially for Riesling, is just how it should be. Is there anything better than drinking aged Riesling ?