VINTAGE 2026 NOTES FROM Jules
We welcomed our vintage crew in early Feb. We have winemakers in training from South Africa, France, Italy, NZ and Hungary and Australia. After a very dry lead into vintage we cautiously began harvesting our Greenock Shiraz in late February. Given the heat our expected yields are low. After picking our first few reds we had a rain event which really hit us hard, with rainfall from 20mm at Greenock to 50mm at Mengler. Despite the worry which comes with rain as we near harvest, it was a welcome relief and the vine response from this rain has been very positive, giving them the energy to carry on to fully ripen their crops.
The steadying effect of the rain has been a huge benefit to our wines, we are pressing off currently some of the first picks from Greenock and our first pick of Command is in a Tulip looking good. Our Wellington Grenache is also in a tulip, where it will spend another 2 days before pressing to old oak for malolactic fermentation. Our second and third pass of Command will happen on Wednesday after a week of warm dry weather.
Tomorrow we are harvesting at Mengler where we will do some trials with small volumes of Viognier to see how we can best make use of this variety, whether it is co-fermented with Shiraz or used to make a white wine.
Looks like we will harvest our Cabernet Sauvignon for Ode to Lorraine and Ashmead late next week which will round out the harvesting part- a huge relief for us to have all our fruit safe in the winery and our vines can then enjoy some Autumn sun with a few showers before heading into dormancy.
IN THE VINEYARD with Conrad
We came into this year off another dry winter. Rainfall was low through May and June and although things improved, we didn’t see things catch-up to average. One upside was that germination of competitive grasses was inhibited so our later emerging flowering cover crops were prodigious this year. Despite this, we were able to irrigate to fill the soils to a good depth, enabling us to start this year with healthy growth and delay starting to irrigation until December - essential for keeping berry size small and driving concentration of flavor.
Thankfully there were no significant frost events this year, there was a uncharacteristic November night that got below freezing but didn’t cause us any meaningful damage. A cool November with a few helpful showers meant flowering was long and slow but we had good fruit set in the end with some nice loose bunches. Summer brought our first significant heat wave events for a few years with two spells reaching into the 40’soC. The first we were well prepared for, but vines seemed to struggle a little more than expected, most likely from not being adapted to these events. The second heat wave was a bit of a monster with 6 days over 35oC in a row and the peak reaching 44oC. The vines seemed to have adapted well by this point so we saw far less impacts, despite it being more severe. We try to keep ground covered with dry grasses through summer to help insulate the soils from the severity of the heat so this likely helped keep vines happy.
Having had a flat rainfall graph all year, February brought a sudden summer storm. Forecasts had us on edge with 70-100mm being predicted at one point, thankfully this didn’t eventuate and although we got 20-30mm in Barossa Valley, it was timed well so that it won’t create dilution of flavor with harvest not beginning for another week or two so vines have time to reset. Already a couple of days on we could see berry size shrinking back down. A week or so later and it could have been a very different story.
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