Day 3 - 21th February

With fruit ripening across the whole vineyard there are enough birds here to make Hitchcock happy.

The current daily routine involves multiple trips to whichever vineyard is not netted and ripening quickly..currently the unpicked Chardonnay P58 vineyard. This is the original Orange Chardonnay vineyard and has been very important to us at Bloodwood for over four decades now. Pristine Chardonnay aromatics, gentle acidity and a rainwater soft palate which really sets it apart.

This year it is very much admired by a MURDER of crows (aka Australian Ravens) which are undermining my equilibrium. They do a Grahame Kennedy from about 6.30am which drives me frothing and cussing out of bed in a vain effort to convince them that my shotgun is more than a sonic threat. I fire a charge in the general direction of said Grahame and what looks like a black blanket of early dawn thieves magic carpets itself out of the vineyard and across the neighbouring grazing paddock to the protection of a group of ring barked trees.

Another shot in their general direction and they decamp to a line of pine trees about 500 meters away. I then return to the winery and by the time my shotgun is safely locked back in my gun cupboard I hear another Faaaaaark from the Chardonnay. And so the process repeats until about 11am at which time they seem to feel it’s too hot to continue to annoy me and disappear. Until around 4pm when battle resumes.

We do use bird scarers here at Bloodwood. In fact I recently invested thousands of dollars in an electronic bird scarer. And it worked. We no longer have any electronic birds attacking our fruit.

All of this high speed pyrotechnics does encourage the picking team to keep moving though..and move they did this morning. They finished yesterday’s allotted Schubert harvest by 11am and we managed to finish pressing the fruit and cleaning up by 4pm just before our daily storm. Still, we have a tank of whole bunch pressed Schubert Chardonnay filled to Bloodwood specified Bloodwood tank height (ie full) settling safely away from crows and thunderstorms.

I even had time to welcome some new visitors to the air-conditioned cellar door and, through the bottles they tasted, tell them of vintages past.

And that’s a very good thing isn’t it?

Another day, another set of Bryce picking buckets to wash before another day and another set of Bryce picking buckets to wash...as the crows would say..faaaaark.

Cheers,

Stephen and Rhonda