Day 12 - 2nd March

Before the drizzle set in late this afternoon, I took a sample of our Merlot Noir (and yes, that is the correct name for the variety) to see how it is progressing.

You’d have to run around in the light rain we are having right now to get wet, so it shouldn’t be too much of a worry overnight unless we end up under a thunderstorm or two. It could be famous last words but I am comforted by the observation that the highest daily rainfall we have ever recorded here at Bloodwood was 110 milimetres on the 1st March 2013 and that turned out to be a fabulous vintage.

We use a mini press to extract the juice from each sample of 400 carefully selected berries. Before this moisture, it is sitting on 13Be neat, a pH of 3.39 and 7.3 g/l T/A. The juice is looking fabulous with typical black cherry roundness and flesh supported by delicate ripe plum aromas.

At some stage I should unload on the film Sideways and the damage it has done to the appreciation of this classic red variety, but I am trying to be positive here.

We were hatched and raised in North Queensland where, amongst many unnatural and natural affronts to sensitive souls like us, there are quite a few mosquitoes. As my misogynistic male forebears pointed out to my impressionable young self, mosquitoes are annoying, persistent, carry diseases too horrible to dwell upon and they bite you when you least expect it. Oh yes, and the ones that bite are female.

We also noticed that they seemed to have a preference for certain individuals. At Bloodwood we specialise in wasps. From every resident local variety to an annual autumnal invasion of the European kind.

I have never been bothered by wasps (or mosquitoes for that matter) but the person they seem to prefer to afflict is Mark. Not a vintage goes by without him being attacked for simply doing his job.

Native wasps of course are very useful predators of lots of larvae which attack grapevines and bunches but they are no fun when you are on the receiving end and the fact that they can sting their prey any number of times without dying themselves makes them formidable.

Still, we remain content in our decision to never use insecticides at Bloodwood.

On the subject of stings, the BIS (Business Inactivity Statement) is due tomorrow.

Every few months, this involves our fabulous accountant visiting me at Bloodwood, tapping a few keys and extracting tens of thousands of dollars from our bank account as our contribution to society.

Now we believe we should all pay our fair share of tax to support our society but it is interesting to report that when we first got into this wine caper, the tax on wine was 0% and we still couldn’t get a loan from any bank to support our enterprise.

When taxation on today’s cellar door retail price can account for up to 41.9% of the total, I don’t know how anybody with any self respect would bother starting a winery these days.

But if you would like to help those less fortunate than yourself and turn our BIS into a BAS, you know what to do.

Cheers,

Stephen and Rhonda