The 2004 season in the Derwent Valley has been amazing. We started out with the wettest start to Spring I have ever seen, breaking many local records. This was good as it really saturated the subsoil to great depth providing the vines with a great start to the season all be it two weeks late. The vines took off well with fairly even bud-burst and good growth. Things dried out by December resulting in bright sunny days and excellent flowering conditions. The resultant set has given us a good size crop of big bunches with about thirty percent more berries per bunch. Luckily the berries were very small so we received high skin to juice ratio. Even so most blocks were bunch thinned mid January with a second thinning at 80% veraison to reduce the crop to an acceptable level.

January & February turned out to be cooler than expected and we never got that week of extra heat we usually get towards the end of summer. This really stretched out the ripening period. All varieties were picked later than usual with higher acid and low pH levels. Our rigorous crop thinning regime really paid dividends this year allowing us to make wines with strong flavour and great balance in a cool year. Overall a good year providing elegant wines with some exceptional parcels of sparkling fruit and the best Merlot we have seen yet.

The annual rainfall in our vineyard was about 30 inches.

Wine Details:

Wine Name: Pinot Grigio

Date Picked: 28 Aprill

Cropped at: @ 12.8° baumé kg/vine

Particulars: Good crop well coloured fruit

  

Wine Name: Riesling

Date Picked: 5th May

Cropped at: @ 12.2° baumé kg/vine

Particulars: Small crop spicy fruit some botrytis

Wine Name: Sauvignon Blanc

Date Picked: 27th April

Cropped at: @ 12.0° baumé kg/vine

Particulars: Big crop fresh flavours

Wine Name: Chardonnay

Date Picked: 14th April

Cropped at: @ 12.7° baumé kg/vine

Particulars: Good acid low PH

Wine Name: Pinot Noir

Date Picked: 8th April

Cropped at: @ 13.1° baumé kg/vine

Particulars: Lovely clean fruit

Wine Name: Merlot

Date Picked: 30th April

Cropped at: @ 12.9° baumé kg/vine

Particulars: Good crop superb fruit