The sky is dark and the air is cool. Slowly, dim sunlight makes its way over the ancient slopes of the Brokenback Range that ripple and rise steeply behind the vine rows. A slight breeze drifts through the leaves as the new day begins to stir.
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Picking teams are already out in force, armed with a bucket and a pair of picking snips. Their hands rush to reach out, in and under the verdant broadleaf to snip away bunches of golden coloured chardonnay, relieving the vine of its heavy promise.
The teams are instructed to pick as quickly as they can, in an attempt to beat the heat; a top of 42˚C today… Briskly, they walk behind a rumbling green tractor as it leads the way down the vine row.
The tractor tows a trailer that’s loaded up with picking bins, which slowly fill with ripe bunches of golden grapes.
Chardonnay today, perhaps semillon tomorrow.
Then, the red grapes sometime over the next few weeks.
From the drought of a long winter to the winds and storms of spring, at last, another year has passed. Mother Nature’s recipe for the harvest has already been written. Her mise en place is set.
For the 191st time in the Hunter Valley, the respiration of the vines converges with the aspirations of the winegrowers, viticulturists, and winemakers as the 2019 vintage begins.
“Australia Day used to be the traditional start for us in the Hunter,” says viticulturist Liz Riley on Wednesday, as she walks between the young and orderly rows of chardonnay grapevines that line the Winmark property in Broke.
“But the dry winter has meant we’ve had a delayed bud burst. Obviously, this season, we’ve been in drought, but we’ve been lucky with rainfall at the right time, which really helped to push the vines along.”
These vines were planted only 18 months ago by second-gen viticulturist Dave Grosser. He’s been working in Hunter Valley vineyards since before he could walk. His father planted chardonnay grapevines on this same site, over 30 years ago.
“This property’s very special to me because my father used to manage it when I was yay big,” Grosser says, dropping his hand to his knee.
“He planted that block of chardy over there, and I’ve planted this block. Today feels really special to me.”
Usually, it takes between three to five years to harvest a commercial crop off a newly established vineyard, but through hard work and clever management, today, these youthful bunches of chardonnay grapes are ready to be picked to make their first ever wine; a blanc de blanc sparkling white.
“The fruit is as clean as a whistle, which is ideal for us,” says winemaker Jeff Byrne from Agnew Wines.
“We’ll top load these bunches into the press, get them through a primary fermentation, before sending them to bottle for a secondary ferment.”
A secondary ferment means the wine will be made in the traditional method, like they do in Champagne. And, according to Jeff, like a good bottle of Champagne, the wine will be ready to drink in around three years or so.
It takes time to make great wine.
The Hunter Valley has been growing wine for a long time. Longer than any other region in Australia. The first wine grapes were planted from 1828 in the valley using vine cuttings taken from the Botanic Gardens in Sydney.
Initially, vineyards were planted throughout the fledgling colonies of the Hunter Valley. In Maitland, Gresford and Paterson, Lochinvar, Singleton, Denman, and as far west as Scone, even Raymond Terrace, where Hunter winegrowing pioneer James King made a wine that was showcased at the Paris Exhibition of 1855. His wine was commended with a medal and served at the table of Emperor Napoleon III.
Nowadays, the sub-regions of the Lower Hunter, particularly Broke, Lovedale and Pokolbin are the ardent heart of the Hunter Valley wine story.
For nearly two centuries, the winegrowers here have watched the skies, prayed for rain and then wished it away, pruned canes, fed the soils, lifted wires, weeded, sprayed, walked or driven down row upon row of flourishing vines emerging from the dormancy of winter into the promise of spring and the dynamic of summer; the season where anticipation and anxiety builds, excitement follows exhaustion, and a year’s worth of work comes to fruition once more.
“You’ve got to take a deep breath sometimes,” Oakvale winemaker James Becker says. “There’s a lot of anticipation leading up to the start of vintage, which can be good and bad,” he says.
“It’s a lot of hard work, both physically and mentally, in such a short space of time, but once you get started, it feels like . . . it reminds you of why you do it, because it’s a lot of fun and there’s a great camaraderie amongst the winery crews,” Becker says.
Just up the road from Winmark, winegrower Andrew Margan is picking the white Spanish grape variety, albariño, marking 2019 as the 23rd vintage for Margan Wines, and his 47th vintage overall.
“Vintage is everything,” Margan says. “It can be exhausting . . . It’s not unheard of to do eighteen hour days for seven days straight during vintage. For eight weeks or so you basically live on adrenaline and coffee and beer. But, my pleasure is in growing grapes and making wine. The vineyard is my happy place.”
Deciding when to remove fruit from the vine is probably the most important decision a winemaker will make all year. It sets the tone for the rest of the wine’s life (providing it makes it through the turbulence of fermentation, unscathed). To get this decision right, a winemaker and their viticulturist must work closely together, walking the rows every morning (and sometimes each afternoon), checking the condition of the fruit, looking, touching and tasting to see if the berries are ripe enough and ready to go.
“What we’re looking for is flavour maturity, which is a balance of sugar ripeness and acidity,” says Brokenwood winemaker Stuart Hordern. “We need to do a couple of things to test that. First we’ll go and pick a few sample bunches out in the vineyard to taste and check for seed ripeness before bringing them back to the lab for analysis . . .
Vintage is everything. It can be exhausting . . . It’s not unheard of to do 18-hour hour days for seven days straight during vintage. For eight weeks or so you basically live on adrenaline and coffee and beer.
- Winemaker Andrew Margan
“There’s no silver bullet, though, you’ve got to be out in the vineyard,” Hordern says. “It’s one thing to get your numbers right, it’s another to actually see the condition of the vines, and see how are they’re holding up in the heat. Because, once the temperature goes above 35˚C, the vines will shut down and stop ripening. They stops accumulating flavour, which can cause unwanted delays and vintage compression.”
Vintage compression is a result of global warming. It occurs when the time between the harvest of early maturing varieties, such as chardonnay, and later ripening varieties, like cabernet sauvignon, becomes shorter. This can cause chaos for winegrowers as the logistics of vintage get disrupted, particularly in a warm climate region like the Hunter.
One clever way Hunter winegrowers are managing this is to use “sunscreen” on their wine grapes.
“Heat waves aren’t ideal, but we’ve got tools to combat them when they come,” Liz Riley says. “We use Kaolin Clay, which is baked at ultra-high temperatures and then milled to a fine power, which we can spray out onto the vines. It looks like snow and reflects the heat off the canopy, so instead of shutting down when the temperature gets above 35˚C, the vines have a bit of a buffer that enables them to keep on ripening. It’s a useful tool to help us to manage vintage compression when it gets hot.”
Just this week, a bush fire started in the foothills behind Usher Tinkler’s family property. Usher noticed the rising smoke from his tractor and alerted the RFS. Soon a water bombing helicopter crew arrived to douse the blaze which burned a hectare of bush before being extinguished.
“It was pretty stressful, I was about two seconds away from having a meltdown,” Tinkler says. “The chopper arrived pretty quickly, and then another one came and they bombed it for about four hours.”
Heat waves are nothing new, it’s the intensity of the UV that has winegrowers like Usher worried about the future of his industry in the Hunter.
“As someone who relies on the environment for my livelihood, events like this scare the hell out of me. We’re farmers, we work for the long term, we plan well into the future,” Tinkler says. “I think people sometimes forget that you can only make wine from grapes and you only get one shot at it each year . . . that’s why it’s called a vintage. Every year is different, we’ve just got to roll with it,” he says.
UPPER HUNTER
While the start of the 2019 vintage in the heart of Lower Hunter has returned to its relatively regular start date a week either side of Australia Day (or thereabouts), the Upper Hunter has been off and racing since early January.
“The drought is definitely affecting us up here,” says Atusko Radcliff of Small Forest Wines. “Our first pick this year was on the 6th of January, which is the earliest I’ve experienced in the Upper Hunter since 1990. The sun feels stronger than last year, and we had some burnt canopy damage, which I’ve not seen before, but all our fruit is perfectly ripe, so the pressure is now on me to make better wine than last year.”
That’s the trick, isn’t it? To make better wine than last year. And the Hunter has made a habit of making great wines, iconic wines, wines of a world class reputation throughout its long established history.
There aren’t many human activities that can cultivate as close a relationship between the people and the land they work. Arguably, winegrowing is the most intimate of all the agricultural activities. The unreliability of the weather throughout the Hunter’s history has been a feature of this region since time immemorial. Indeed, the region is famous for being one of the most consistently inconsistent wine growing regions in Australia. Yet, as Max Lake of Lake’s Folly once observed, ‘where wine is easy to grow, it is seldom superb’.
Right now, the vignerons and winemakers of the Hunter Valley are on the cusp of another long and challenging vintage, but what else is new?
