2024 Harvest: From the Winery

There’s no sugar-coating this year’s harvest; it’s been extremely challenging. One way of briefly describing it would be that it’s more of a  ‘sparkling wine year’ than a ‘red wine year’.

We had fairly constant low pressure weather fronts coming across from the Atlantic for the whole of September and October which made for a very tough harvest logistically. We analysed the sugars and acidity daily, and usually the ripening trajectory determines the picking schedule.

However, this is a lot harder with unfavourable conditions, also rain dilutes the bunches for 2 days giving inaccurate readings so it was not so straightforward. 

Patience paid off and the resulting wines in tank are good, but there is not as much still wine as we normally have. An example of this is that we’re very pleased with the quality of the Bacchus and Pinot Rosé but we won’t be making any red wines.

On the sparkling side...

We have excellent flavours in our sparkling varieties this year due to the longer growing season, but they have high acidity; this has two benefits:

1. A percentage of this year’s wines will be very good to store as reserve wines to use in future years of lower acidity.
2. Reserve wines we have in tank and barrel from previous years will be a key component for this year. Much like in Champagne and other regions where blending these older vintage wines with the fresh wines from this harvest helps give the wine depth and ensures consistency in style. Krug, for example, includes between 30% and 50% reserve in their flagship wine.

The interesting part will be in January when we start the blending trials.