As spring stirs across the land, there's no better way to celebrate the romance of the season than with a glass of Bloodwood Pinot Noir. Nestled in the best site of the cool-climate wine region of New South Wales, Bloodwood wines capture the essence of spring in every bottle of our rare Pinot Noir.

With its delicate balance of ripe cherry and hints of spice, this structured Pinot Noir is the perfect companion for every Spring celebration.

Spring 2024 New Release Tasting Dozen

To celebrate the season, Rhonda and I would like to tempt you to leap into Sprummer with these beautiful new Bloodwood releases

2023 Schubert Chardonnay

Because we are re-working and re-invigorating our original Chardonnay vineyard, for the first time in many years we didn’t grow enough P58 Chardonnay so we combined what little fruit we had with our Schubert vineyard Chardonnay and this is the result. We hope you enjoy it.

2023 Big Men In Tights

Another innovation in the long history of the amazing Bloodwood BMIT. 2023 was a long, cool growing season here on Griffin Road and because of the paucity of both Malbec and Cabernet Franc fruit we elected to use a portion of our Shiraz to whole bunch this BMIT into existence. Pretty fruit, just off dry and delicious summer drinking.

2019 Shiraz

The last super ripe year here at Bloodwood with the drought hardening its grip. A wine of outstanding balance in the ripe fruit white pepper style so typical of this special part of the Bloodwood vineyard.

2019 Cabernet Sauvignon

See above. This is an outstanding example of Bloodwood Cabernet Sauvignon. Ripe, succulent, layered with cassis and dark fruits glowing in the embrace of fine oak and fruit tannins.

2019 Pinot Noir

As you know, we have never brought any fruit into Bloodwood. Every bottle is produced by us solely from our own fruit. This means that there is vintage variation particularly from indicator varieties like Riesling and Pinot Noir. This is a particularly fine example of our savoury red berry Pinot Noir which is as expressive as it is rare..Enjoy.

Total price would normally be $454 excluding freight.

Spring 2024 offer is $420, including freight.

WTF Frost

Agriculture is a deadly serious game of Monopoly. For winter, August was a very warm and dry month in S.E. Australia. This meant that budburst was around two weeks earlier than it usually is and all crops, including vines were up and about in those balmy days. Given that we can’t reliably plant tomatoes in Orange until Melbourne Cup day because of the menace of frosts, we were very anxious about the vulnerability of our soft new-season growth.

There are a few limited things you can do to help protect your vines from a “normal” frost event. These include late pruning to hold back budburst: maintaining a manicured vineyard floor to help absorb as much warmth as possible during the day which will re-radiate during the night; giving the vines a good copper spray immediately before the expected event which “frostcoats” the tissues, and planting your vines on a free (air) draining NE slope with no structure (man or naturally made) below the vineyard which impedes this flow of cold air.

Smudge pots burning amongst the vines, overhead misting irrigation and huge frost fans which keep the inversion layer on the hop also help.

In California, where everything is bigger and you can charge USD $150 for a bottle of wine, they even use low flying helicopters to stir things up.

Of all these measures however, selecting a mid-slope NE oriented site with good air drainage is the most important. That may give you the 0.5C buffer you need to avoid a typical radiation frost. Freeze (or advection) frosts, which are essentially polar blasts, are almost impossible to manage around so you have to resort to all of the above, particularly the bit about site selection, and also enjoy a fair amount of dumb luck.

Freeze frosts sometimes last a few days and are often followed by a radiation frost just to keep you on your toes. This is what happened to vast swathes of the Australian vineyard in mid-September. We registered 5.1 hours of frost level temperatures on the 15th and 16th of September and were very lucky to suffer only very minor damage in the lowest spots of our Schubert vineyard whereas many particularly warmer, even earlier bud bursting vineyards in South Australia, Victoria, the MIA, Canberra and even Mudgee tragically suffered up to 80% losses.

There’s no $200 on offer for this agricultural game of Monopoly... they just can’t get past GO for vintage 2025.

As frequent visitors to the cellar door will have discovered, we have a new pup to take the place of poor old Biff. This fellow is from the same excellent Karana Kelpie stud and comes from a long line of Renovator Dogs.

To date he has atomically re-arranged several girlie shop-bought beds; eaten his training rake; completely chewed the front off our traditional kelpie barrel necessitating the sacrifice of a 2022 barrel with angle iron reinforcement of the doorway; knocked over and eaten some kilo or so rat bait and generally had a great time crutching unsuspecting visitors.

Their real name is Kip, but they thinks their name is NO BITING.

Feel free to introduce yourself to them next time you visit… but keep your knees together and your modesty intact.