Day 15 5th March

Many moons ago I remember visiting Philip Shaw at his Roxburgh vineyard in the Hunter Valley. It was Christmas day and I found him head down and plumbers crack up trying to deal with an irrigation problem.

It is an image I have been unable to forget.

At the time, Philip was already twice recognised as The International Wine Maker of the Year because of his exploits with Rosemount and I wondered how this accolade had altered his life; how his wine making lot had improved because of this stratospheric success.

It hadn’t. As I say, an image I can’t forget and a fact of life for Australian wine makers.

There’s a hose and here are the sticky picking buckets. Now get glamourous.

When you have a two tonne press load of fruit which you need to shove rugby style about the winery floor between loading and discharging, wheels in working order are a good thing. If you can’t move the press, you can’t continue pressing. So it is a good thing that at Bloodwood we don’t throw anything away. You never know when it may come in handy.

And so it came to pass today that a wheel on our press decided to completely abrogate its reason for existence and disintegrate mid cycle. This required a trip to the groundsman’s shed for possible appropriate spare parts. Such is the depth of history and complexity hiding in said shed, it turns out we had a selection of two to choose from.

As I say, the wheels aren’t falling off just yet.

Today we hand picked and whole bunch pressed the Malbec and Cabernet Franc we traditionally use for our famous Big Men In Tights, a style we have been making here at Bloodwood for four decades.

This is a very expensive and wasteful process given the quality of the fruit we sacrifice for the wine where most of the good bits which make red wine red (ie; those delicious anthocyanins found in and near the skin of the grape) are sacrificed.

This tedious business nevertheless results in a consistently lovely pink which will accompany a very wide range of foods. As I often say, it’s great with pizzas, Sunday roasts with caramelised onions and sweet potato and any food you can find in Cleveland Street Sydney except the baklava.

It is a lovely colour straight off the press and came in at 11.5 Be; pH of 2.28 and T/A of 6.4g/l so if I don’t stuff it up, it should be worth all the effort.

Picking grapes is a serious and exhausting business which is not a game for the feint-hearted.

Dodging wasp nests, and loading sticky buckets in the mid day sun is not all that pleasant so I ask you..

Cheers,

Stephen and Rhonda