Beautiful barrels...

Just tasting through our 2009 Pinot Noir which is currently maturing in barrique in our cold cellar awaiting some warmer temperatures so that the malolactic fermentation can kick off. Some of our oak comes from the Burgundy cooper Gillet. Heres a look at how each barrel is made, courtesy of BKWine who also have a large number of other interesting wine videos available to view on Youtube.

Industry turmoil continues...

When a handful of companies control most of the industry (in NZ) then there is bound to be trouble when one of them decides to make a few changes. The region of Gisborne has really taken a hit in the wake of Pernod-Ricards (Montana) decision to terminate a large number of contracts with its growers. The impact on the region will be quite far-reaching.

Read more here from the Gisborne Herald today. Or here in the NBR. And here for some video footage from TV3's national news.

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Ps - thanks Castro-Martin (i think) for the great photo

Bottle Shock...

A few shots from our recent bottling run, our biggest yet. Four days of folding, lifting, packing and stacking that left everyone feeling more than a little sore. On the plus side though, it is the final act in the making of our wonderful product and it is highly satisfying to see the end product.

Wine should learn from Beer...

Beer advertising, it seems, has always been much better than its Wine counterpart at appealing and attracting a wide and youthful audience - the sort of audience that Wine should be trying to appeal to.

Wineries (with money and an advertising budget) pay attention...

Sanity and Sanitization are two different things...

Winemaking, as you often hear, is 1% art, 2% science and 97% cleaning. And let me tell you that there are times when the 97% cleaning part just loses its appeal. Just like any job there are bits you never enjoy. Most people, who ask what I do for a job, always say 'great, do you get to drink wine every day'. I dont tell them its less than 1% of the time...

Postcard from New Zealand...

Having a brief holiday in Kaikoura, about 2 hours up the coast from Christchurch. There are plenty of seals on the rugged beaches along the coastline and from our house we can see dolphins leaping out of the water. The house is over the road from the beach and at the back the hills rise steeply to the snow covered mountains beyond. Its picture postcard stuff. And remote too, getting out of the city reminds us how sparsely populated rural New Zealand is.

With a wine in one hand and a computer in the other...

Making wine is the easy part. The hard part is selling it. The times are changing and wineries are going to have to change their methods to keep up. WineBusiness.com recently published an interesting article by Liz Thach entitled Tips to Market Wine to Millenials. It seems that getting through to the young folk of today its all about reaching them ONLINE above anything else. Something that NZ wineries are not very good at doing, at least not yet. Read on...

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To cut a long story short, the millennial generation is massive, growing and wine loving - but how to attract them to your product ? When buying it seems they value speed, reliability, friction free transactions, honesty and convenience. Price is not the major driver.

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The majority of purchasing decisions are based on word of mouth which come from either face-to-face, online social networking or texting. When asked what type of wine advertising and promotion works best, the Millennials cited online marketing (Facebook, blogs etc) in first place and wine events as second.

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Just a look at the online stats shows where the future lies. Most use Facebook and update at least twice a day, Twitter is popular but second to texting for short messages. 90% own cellphones and text on average 500/month. Email is old hat. A third have a blog and half read blogs. They watch huge amounts of online videos (eg Youtube) and forward to friends often. They spend more time online than in front of TV and use their phones almost as much as computers to connect to the Internet.

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Ive just done a spellcheck on this blogpost and my computer has highlighted 'millennials', 'facebook', 'texting' and 'youtube'. If it cant keep up what chance have I, wheres my pipe and slippers?

New Zealands best unsigned band...

The Hustle
Listen here - http://www.box.net/shared/9vp6cvkufr

Celebrating a Great Vintage...

It all added up to a brilliant day recently when Sandihurst held its first annual End of Vintage celebration inside the winery...

take an empty winery...

cook up a storm...

a traditional Potjiekos meal...

invite alot of people...

serve it up...

a little conversation...

a dash of great music...

a firing squad for people misbehaving...

and an auction for a good cause (the Westpac Rescue Helicopter)

Riesling 2008...

Recent review from Jo Burzynska in The New Zealand Herald 12-6-09

Sandihurst Waipara Riesling 2008 $22.50

Sandihurst is a winery based in West Melton, a Canterbury sub-region that's a mere 20 minutes from central Christchurch. Sourcing fruit from across the South Island, this fragrant low-alcohol riesling is from its Waipara vineyard, brimming with succulent stone fruit and mandarin, combined with blossom, spice and mineral over a fresh lemony core.

Corked! - another wine movie...

Hot on the heels of Bottle Shock, Sideways, A Good Year and any other wine movie you can think of comes Corked!, a mockumentary-style film about the Californian wine industry. Click the links to read reviews from the LA Times or Hollywood Reporter or even from the movies own Facebook page.

你好 Sandihurst...

Its not often the words 'high ranking official from Beijing' and 'Sandihurst Winery' go hand in hand but so it was yesterday when a visiting Chinese trade delegation rounded off their tour to New Zealand with a visit and tasting at our winery.
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Pictured above, with winery owners Hennie and Celia Bosman, is the highest of those officials, Vice Minister Zhi Shuping of "General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of the People's Republic of China (AQSIQ)".
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Quite timely as we work towards our wines beign available in mainland China.

Bienvenido a Sandihurst...

Last spring at Sandihurst we hosted Chileans Sebastián Pérez-Canto Orellana and Jimena Cordovez of Andeswine.com as part of their Wine Tourism series from around the world. As well as tasting our wines and looking through the winery they were also quite taken with our ground breaking vineyard trial using recycled crushed glass as a reflective mulch. The above video is the result of their time with us. Disfrutar !

Testing, testing...

Just checking the 2009 Sandihurst Waipara Riesling for heat stability. Its a standard test that (nearly) all wineries do. Most white wines have Bentonite added to them in order to confer stability on the proteins found in wine. Unstable proteins, once too warm, give the wine an unsightly haze.

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Bentonite is a clay, basically an aluminium silicate, that when dispersed in water exists as minute flat plates. We add the Bentonite, in the order of 1-2g/L or thereabouts and mix the tank thoroughly. The positively charged proteins then attach themselves to the negatively charged and heavier Bentonite plates before falling to the bottom of the tank. We generally filter the now-stable wine to another tank. discarding the lees at the bottom.

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The test for stability used here is simple. A 0.45u filtered sample is kept in a water bath at 80C for 6 hours and then cooled/observed for haze. As seen above this Riesling, after an addition of 1.2g/L, still exhibited a little haze so will need more Bentonite added.

Harnessing the Power of Rats...

A short clip showing how we empty our fermenters into the press once all the 'free run' wine has been pumped out. Its gentle on the fruit, no pumps here, but does involve a bit of muscle and the wine is generally quite cold on bare feet at this point. But of course that is why God invented Cellar Rats.

We love cork...

Good to see the occasional article in support of the mighty cork. Such support is a bit rare down here in New Zealand where something approaching 95% of all wine is under screwcap. But thanks to the beauty of the internet we can read newspapers such as the Miami Herald who's article today Good Cap Bad Cap looks beyond the bottle to the environmental issues of cork.

Tools of the Trade...

The three crucial things you need when you are digging out the skins from a Pinot Noir fermenter - not unlike a day at the beach - bucket spade and clean feet !

Well done us...

Just to mention that two of our wines, the 2007 Central Otago Pinot Noir and the 2007 Nelson Riesling, were both awarded a SILVER medal at the Selections Mondiales Des Vins, North Americas largest wine competition.

More cleaning...

When it comes to pressing this years Pinot Noir part of the job is to prepare the barrels in order to receive the new wine. The wine will be in the barrel for the best part of a year so they need to be in good shape. The barrels previously held last years wine of course but have been empty for the last couple of months. Empty but they had been sulphured in order to protect them against any unwanted bacteria and so now need to be cleaned.

We clean them using the barrel washer shown above. A thin washer arm extends inside the barrel to the very bottom. About halfway down high pressure water is sprayed to all parts of the barrel and is then sucked back out the green hose via a vacuum ball at the end of the arm. All very efficient. I then fill the barrels with water to stand overnight just to reswell any stave's which may have opened as the wood dried when the barrel was empty. Once drained, the barrel is then ready to receive the new wine which will stay there for the best part of a year as it matures and develops.

Things you need in a winery...

A Fittings Board where you can keep all your valves, hose attachments, joiners, lees stirrer, reducers, caps, barrel spear etc. Essential in the ongoing drive for a clean and tidy winery.

The Top 10...

The 10 best architectural wonders of the wine world ? New Zealands Peregrine is in there. Check it out over on Designcrave.

Quaff TV reviews our Riesling...

Cameron Douglas from quaff.co.nz reviews the Sandihurst 2007 Riesling. Give it a try and see if you agree with him.

Lessons to learn...

Dumping Sauvignon Blanc

News today that one of the largest wine companies in the USA is about to launch a $3 Chardonnay. Bad news for the reputation of Australian wine internationally surely. And at $3 its half the price of Yellow Tail, the USA's #1 imported wine brand. With 20 million surplus litres in the tanks following the 2008 vintage it seems that wine companies were only too willing to part cheaply in order to free up tank space for the 09 vintage. Read more about it in The Australian newspaper.

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On a smaller but equally concerning scale is NZ Sauvignon Blanc. Millions of litres of the 2008 vintage have already been sold/dumped to overseas markets at budget prices for similiar reasons to the Australians. A look at current bulk wine offerings reveals there are still more 2008 litres available BUT alarmingly there is in excess of 3 million litres of 2009 Sauvignon Blanc for sale already at under $4/litre. I hope WineNZ are already working towards an industry-wide solution.

To Pumpover or Plunge...

Not quite as riveting as Jamie Goodes Mosel video but an important part in the process from grape to glass never-the-less. During ferment the CO2 produced pushes the skins to the surface of the fermenter. With Pinot Noir we usually hand plunge the cap back into the wine at regular intervals to stop the skins from drying out and attracting bacteria and to enhance the maceration/extraction of phenolic compounds. With Syrah, as above, we choose to pump over the wine onto the cap where we can be a little more gentle on the skins (which have more tannin than Pinot anyway) and provide the fermenting wine with a valuable source of oxygen (Syrah yeasts often misbehave if not supplied with the right conditions for ferment).

Trouble brewing...

One in three men and one in six women in Britain is classed as a ' hazardous drinker', meaning their thirst for alcohol is putting them at risk of physical and psychological damage. How do you fare.......