2013 Vintage Looking Good

Pinot Gris, 26 Nov. 2012.

I went out today to take the attached photos of Pinot Gris and could not help feeling we may be in for one of the really good vintages in 2013.

I know it is not a good thing to celebrate too early but the current vintage is looking great for us at Blue Rock. Our elevated and sloping vineyards meant no frost damage at all, compared to horror stories from  Central Otago where Spring frosts did huge damage in some regions. There were also reports of frost damage in parts of the Hawkes Bay and the Wairarapa.

We are looking at a harvest with the promise of both quality and quantity. There is a good bunch count per cane so what we need now is a good flowering through end November and the crop should be an excellent one. In fact, if the flowering is too good, we may be faced with having to fruit thin so we don't over-crop the vines.That is not a bad problem to have!

I did smile to myself when I took the photos as I was thinking I have been very lax in keeping my blog up to date. At one stage I had thought it would be interesting to take a single vine and post a picture of it each week through the season, but travel and other commitments got in the way. It was so lovely out there today that I am motivated to pick the idea up and follow it through from now on; let's see how I go!

Pinot Gris before flowering

I felt it would be good for those interested to see just how quickly vines grow through the season  and how much they change over time. For those not familiar with grapes, what you see here are very much potential grapes; these wee guys still have to flower and be pollinated before they develop into full sized berries. So, what we need over the next few weeks are warm days and gentle breezes for that to happen successfully. Rain and/or strong winds are not what we want - that just washes or blows the pollen away. I'll post photos of the same bunch over time so you can follow the development of the grapes.

Tough Vintage for 2012

I am currently travelling in Queensland, Australia, working with our major client's key stores; Vintage Cellars and First Choice. These are both top wine chains in the Australian market, with knowlegeable staff. The stores stock a great range of wines too. If you live in Australia, check them out sometime. Make sure you buy a bottle of Murdoch James Estate wine while you are there though!

Yesterday I was in a store in Brisbane and one of the team said " I would love to work on a vineyard and make wine, it must be great fun?".

I was prompted to say "Yes it is" but had to qualify the comment to "Yes it is, most of the time". The qualifier was because this year we had a very small vintage, due to cold, windy weather at flowering time, with the result that we had a much smaller fruit set than normal with some varieties. While our white harvest was top quality and good quantity, for some red varieties we had such small harvests that we will not be able to produce a wine from this vintage. An example is our 2012 Syrah. Such a small crop means it is not able to be bottled as a stand-alone wine. Does not sound so bad until you realise the implications; if there is no 2012 Blue Rock Syrah available, customers who enjoyed the 2011 and older vintages may change to something else before we release the 2013. Then we have to work with our retailers to rebuild the brand, and that equals time and money.

In other cases, like the Pinot Noir, the fruit was terrific quality, but the crop was down 40% per hectare. So we will make excellent wines from the Pinot Noir this year, but not a lot of it. We will just have sufficient wine to supply demand, so again sounds OK, until you dig deeper....

The cost per litre of wine is much higher in a small vintage than it is in a normal one. Think about it this way: we spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in the vineyard to grow our grapes. And we have to spend that regardless of harvest size. We need to prune, mow, tuck, hand pick, trellis, etc with a full crop in mind. Now, if we are targeting (say) 200 tonnes of pinot a year, and we only get 100 tonnes, we have still spent the money - it is a sunk cost regardless of what size crop we get. So in this scenario (2012) effectively our cost of production had doubled. If the normal cost of wine per bottle was $10, now it is $20. Can we increase our wine $10 per bottle to recover that? Sadly, the answer is "no way". In the current tight market, no retailer, importer or distributor is going to allow wineries to increase prices $10 a bottle, just because of a small vintage.

So, what happens is that wineries have to absorb the extra costs and hope to recover it from other vintages; again easier said than done. This is more so with smaller boutique wineries where they have no way to shed expenses. The big industrial producers who harvest with machines, buy grapes in, and have other scale benefits are less at risk. So think about that when you pick a wine up in a wineshop; in tough times, the small producers need coonsumer understanding of their need to recover costs. Maybe spend a few bucks extra and don't buy the big brand label that is on 'special'? Ask a store team member to recommend something a just little more expensive and enjoy it in the knowledge the extra $5 or $6 dollars is going to help a small, passionate producer somewhere. It will probably be a better wine too!

Hence my qualified answer.

Yes, vineyards are a great way to make a living, but make no mistake; they are not an easy way to make a living. Rest assured, boutique winemakers don't do it just for the money!

Lab Work

I sometimes think a lot of folk get the impression that wine is all about growing the grapes in the vineyard and then converting them to wine in the winery. That is true to a large extent, as is the reality that the making of a great wine comes down to the creative talents of the winemaker. There are no formulas to follow slavishly, unless you are one of the big producers who are looking for the same basic wine year after year.

But there are a lot of technical things small wineries can do to help ensure we make a good wine and avoid risks. At Murdoch James Estate we have a small laboratory where we test sample from the vineyard before harvest to check sugar levels, and during ferments to track the conversion of those sugars to alcohol. We also test for things like acidity. This technical detail is then paired with winemaker Carl's judgement and palate to deliver the final wine.


For the vintage Maria, our Administration Assistant, worked with Carl in the winery over vintage to help with processing, plunging and pressing. But she also did most of the lab work; a very important task she completed with skill.






This year's grapes are now in, and nearly all the ferments are complete. It has been a lovely harvest and the Pinot Noir should be excellent this year. Fine weather made harvest a breeze, and the teamwork was terrific. Now the vineyard looks a treat as the autumn colours are coming out. In fact, when I was driving into work this morning, the poplars at the gate were stunning and I had to take a photo - not a bad place to work is it!!??
                                                        

First pick 2010

$%#@*&!

This wine business is hard work!

We started our 2010 harvest last Thursday (8th April 2010) and, while we expected a smaller crop than last year doue to the bad weather at flowering and the cold weather in January last, as the grapes are coming in, it is much smaller than we thought. In some varieties, particularly the chardonnay, we are down over 50%. Pinot and Syrah is not so bad, but also smaller crops. If you think about it that means for the same inputs, we get less grapes (read that as less wine to sell), and at a higher average cost per tonne. If we have to buy in grapes to plug any demand gaps, that is a double-whammy on the budget and not pleasant to contemplate.

Those of you who know me know that I am nothing if not an optomist! So, yes there is a silver lining to the cloud - small cops, but also great quality. Winemaker Carl thinks this is the best quality Pinot Noir grapes we have harvested ever, so watch out for the 2010 releases.

Now in an ideal world, one would simply charge more per bottle, but the wine world does not work that way. In fact, due to serious oversupply out of Australia and Marlborough, the pressure on price is downwards. Just holding prices flat is pretty good in the current environment. So we have to absorb these costs with their negative impact on profitability. While our wines are very highly regarded, it is not possible to apply price increases at present. And just when we were starting to make a good profit - ah well, no-one told me wine-making was an easy path to riches.........

That brings me back to our new social media strategy, which is designed to to drive sales through non-traditional channels, where costs are not so high. For example, selling on-line direct from Murdoch James means we don't lose margin to middle-men.We are also looking at working with innovative on-line marketers in international markets, and all our communications tools are now in place to underpin that (Blog, Twitter, Face-book, Website, etc) so hopefully the message is getting out there that Murdoch James Estate is determined to make the most of these new technologies to communicate with our potential customers and give them the confidence to try our wines. The more I enter into this medium, the more it reinforces to me how dramatically and quickly the way wines are being purchased is changing. I have an emerging view that one day, apart from on-premise sales, we will be selling all our wines one way or other over the internet.


Now, I'm off to Vietnam and Hong Kong this week to promote our wines, so some interesting posts to follow.

A stunning weekend

Sunday 19th April

Well, another 2 days full on - again absolutely stunning weather on both Saturday and Sunday so the team are picking in great conditions, and continue to bring in excellent grapes. The winery is now starting to bulge at the seams as all the fermenters are filling up and floor space is at a premium. We are juggling Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir at present and needed some extra help in the winery so that the winery team can get some sleep.

Steve has come in from the vineyard, and we are lucky that an experienced Angela was able to join us – while her day job is olive oil, she has worked in wineries as far away as California – so right from the time she arrived she was in up to her knees in wine. As you will see from the photos, we are needing to jump into the big ferments to break up the hard caps formed by grapes floating on the surface of the wine - lucky ferments are warm. There are some great images of Angela hard at work!

Interestingly, breaking the cap this way is gentler on the grapes than mechanical processes. There is logic in what the old winemakers used to do!

We are now well past the halfway point – just a little more Pinot to come in, then small crops of Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay and Syrah. We are really thrilled with the quality of the latter, and the warm autumn is ‘polishing’ the fruit to perfection. We have had a great team of pickers this year. All locals, some are real characters, but the most important thing is their experience, which means they only harvest the best grapes. This is a side of vintage often overlooked, but without good pickers, it is hard to keep the standards up. They can make a great deal of difference.

Hand Harvesting

Wednesday 16th April


Another beautiful day – will it last? We are all hoping so. We harvested Pinot Gris and Sauvignon Blanc today, so I have attached images of the team picking the grapes, as well as images of the fruit and the processing. I hope you find it interesting. There are more images in our website gallery too. Click on this link: http://www.murdochjames.co.nz/gallery/simpleviewer/index.html

We pick everything by hand, and train the team to only collect the best fruit. Anything with mildew or unripe fruit is left behind for the birds (did you know one green grape in 100 will have an impact on the taste of the final wine!). Only with the best fruit can you hope to make world class wine. That’s why we never use a mechanical harvester. They are like big vacuum cleaners that suck everything up; ripe, unripe and diseased, together with bits of leaf and stalks. Then we sort one more time at the winery before the fruit goes into the press. There is a great image of the Sauvignon Blanc being gently pressed below

We were thrilled with the quality of the Sauvignon Blanc this year, and were also fortunate to have a small part of the crop which developed botrytis. Known as the 'Noble Rot' this mould shrivels the berries and concentrates that flavour, so we have decided to keep that fruit separate and a desert wine which we will call 'Noble Sauvignon'.

The fruit is looking great and the weather perfect!

Tuesday 14th April


Well underway now. We have had a dream run! All of Sunday through to today have been dry and mild - one of the reasons Martinborough is regarded as one of the best, if not the very best, of New Zealand's vineyard areas. The grapes have been coming in in great condition and we are thrilled at the prospect of being able to work with such a high level of quality. A great deal of credit must go to the vineyard team of Steve, Cliff and Nerissa for seeing everything through to a great position. I was going to say conclusion, but while maybe it is for the vineyard, it just the beginning for the winery! So far the winemaking days are getting longer and longer. Yesterday was from 7.00am through to 1.00am the next day, as we processed two large pressings of Pinot Gris, while starting 5 Pinot Noir ferments. We ferment each clone of Pinot Noir separately, so there are lots of small ferments happening all over the winery floor area. Today I have posted some images of the fruit coming in and the start of processing. Tomorrow I'll have a look at the team in the vineyard more closely and explain all the steps they take to ensure we only harvest absolutely top quality wine