Thanks Pacific Rim. Good luck with the harvest.

Pruning is in full swing. Heres a few shots from the Georges Road vineyard in Waipara.

Heavy cuts made, wood pulled out to the mid row awaiting a good mulching.

Row 18 waits patiently to be trimmed and tied down.

10 rows complete, around 200 to go!

Just reading over on wineanorak about Pisa Range, a small producer in Central Otago. Theres a comment about trialling sheep dags as a weed suppressant in the vineyard. This seems to be a classic piece of Kiwi number 8 wire styled ingenuity. And no reason why it shouldnt work. The dags probably not only block out light from the soil but could also act as a heat sink much in the same way the Sandihurst Glass trial did. There, we used crushed recycled glass as a vineyard undervine mulch in order to both suppress weeds and to try and alter the temperature in the fruit zone of the vine (by reflected light and heat) so as to provide a more positive growing environment for the fruit .   

As for the dags, surely the major question is, Does any of the flavour come through in the wines! This may in part be an answer to why, in the words of Anthony Hansen, “great burgundy smells of sh*t”.

Ive been doing some lab trials for our 2010 white wines (Riesling and Pinot Gris) to determine the level of Bentonite that will be required in order to make the wines protein stable. Its a fairly essential step as a wine that is not protein stable and stored too warm, can throw a fairly unslightly haze in the bottle that would make it practically unsaleable. So I set up a small bench trial with varying levels of Bentonite addition of a stock solution to a set volume of wine. This is usually in the range of 0.5 to 2.5 g/L. Each wine is then sterile filtered via that syringe at the bottom of the photo and then sat in a heated (80C) water bath for 6 hours. I find most of my wines tend to ‘pass’ at around the 1.0-1.5 g/L level.

As I was setting up the filter I noticed that the knife I use to handle the filter sheets is in fact a piece of airline cutlery. Its from Ansett Airlines, whcih used to fly between NZ and Australia. Historians could probably date the piece. These days the thought that airlines routinely used to supply its passengers with small metal serrated knives is hard to believe.

Always great when you come across something quite refreshing. Heres a snippet from the recent winedirect newsletter about one of their recent Rhone arrivals. They love the wine but its good to see them telling it like it is because we all know the wine industry has its fair share of precious souls….     

Domaine Roger Sabon is a relatively new agency for us, this being only our second shipment. So by way of a quick introduction, we can tell you that they are…

I don’t know what this really says about New Zealand as a country or the people who live here but this is a classic scene you certainly wouldnt find in too many other countries around the world.

Its a booth selling free-range eggs at the farm gate on the roadside of the main road through the Waitaki Valley. The booth is unmanned but has an honesty box for you to place your money inside. Not only that it also has a ‘change’ box, full of coins, where you can take your change from if you didnt have the correct money to put into the first box. Its just classic rural New Zealand.

The Waitaki is also a fledgling viticultural area and has a climate not that dissimilar to Central Otago. The local hills are packed with limestone rocks encrusted with seashells and fossils. There has even been discoveries of several prehistoric dolphin and whale fossils in the area, all of which is now nearly 100kms from the ocean.

Just back from a weeks holiday in an amazing place. After 50, mostly unsealed, kilometers off the Farlie-Tekapo road you come to Black Forest on the shores of Lake Benmore. Isolated and unspoilt, the sole farm here has built a couple of top class holiday houses, or bachs as we like to call them here in NZ (although the luxury of these places is stretching the definition of the word ‘bach’) . All on the lake shore with uninterrupted views towards Mount Cook in the distance. With frosty mornings and brilliantly sunny days, it was dream winter holiday weather not to mention the night skies too which were jam packed with stars (this area near Tekapo is world renown for its stargazing qualities). A perfect adventure paradise for the kids too, I cant say enough about it. Check out the website here or contact the Black Forest farm owners Caroline and Ben here.

With another frosty start to our day here in Canterbury it makes my mind turn to warming comfort food to keep the chill at bay. Celebrity chef Ray McVinnie recently published a few winter warming recipes in the Sunday Star Times and well known wine writer John Saker chose our 2007 Waipara Pinot Noir as the perfect match. Sounds like a great idea and I will be getting hold of the ingredients this week to give the recipes a try. For those of you who would also like to try here is the link to the article with the recipes – enjoy!
Ray McVinnie recipes matched with Sandihurst 2007 Waipara Pinot Noir

The FIFA World Cup may have unearthed Paul the Octopus as the one of the great psychics of all time, surpassing even the legendary Punxsutawney Phil in his ability to get it right,  but here at Sandihurst we have our own legend in the making – Woody the Winefly. Not only can he correctly predict if I have just enough sulphur in the wine he is also a genius at telling me whether I need to do a little extra cleaning in the cellar or if I should be concerned about a particular barrel of Pinot Noir.  

As for the final, Woody is going with Spain, as he has quite a few friends working in the wine industry there.