As part of our long standing commitment to the minimisation of carbon dioxide emissions from all we do here at Bloodwood, we are proud to announce the commissioning of our first three-phase EV installation.

As all executive members of our Exclusive Wine Club will attest, the conversion of what was a range lice-infested barren moonscape of a property back in 1983 to the wooded wonderland you see today has seen thousands of trees planted during over four decades of regenerative agriculture.

Hand pruning, hand picking, hand wringing during in-house wine making and a continuing commitment to doing what is right for our environment has transformed Bloodwood to a peaceful, productive and - depending on how much support this newsletter gets - profitable proposition.

For all practical day to day requirements, we are off the grid; off Social (sic) Media and to the joy of a significant number of our audience, off piste.

For decades we have been increasingly electrifying everything we do here at Bloodwood. Electric lawn mowers; chainsaws; underpants; All Terrain Vehicles; Road Bikes; Solar Bores; Irrigation transfer pumping and importantly, cellar door air-conditioning. That’s where you and your technologically leading-edge electric vehicle play an important innovative role in further reducing the Bloodwood carbon footprint.

If you would like to air-condition the cellar door during your visit or take advantage of a flushing toilet, simply connect your fully charged EV to our new facility and we’ll do the rest.

Not only does the energy stored in your car battery reduce our electricity costs, but it also seems to be leading to vastly reduced tasting times at the cellar door. This win win situation further demonstrates our continuing commitment to reducing carbon dioxide pollution here at Bloodwood.

NB: Regardless of what energy you use for vehicular propulsion, there’s no need to panic; the 100 solar panels and 50kWh battery storage we have here at Bloodwood means the Eftpos machine is operational 24/7.

It’s been a bit of a rush this growing season. Already, in the first week of November, most of the vines are well into what is known as their Grand Period of Growth. With the record setting warmth of October, most varieties are growing up to 25mm per day. Leaves, the solar panels of each vine, are expanding in size and quickly taking over as the engines of growth from the overwintering carbohydrate stored in the roots and trunks of the plant.

If your vines haven’t been carefully balanced during pruning, you will begin to see increased lateral and sucker growth which will need to be dealt with to avoid overcrowding and shading of the developing inflorescences and bunches.

It seems likely that our early varieties like Chardonnay will be flowering well before the traditional end of November, and that the late Cabernet Sauvignon will be all through well before Christmas this growing season.

What this all means in the vineyard is that the pressure is on to keep in front of the potential for outbreaks of fungal diseases like Downy and Powdery mildew. Primary infection periods for Downy mildew occur when the temperature is above 10C and we have 10 mm or more rainfall over 10 hours. If this occurs over night, then these conditions are ideal.

How many times has this occurred at Bloodwood this Spring? According to our weather station, there have been three periods since 20th September that tick all the boxes. As we only use soft prophylactic copper and sulphur based fungicides, we are becoming very used to the inside of our tractor cabin. Still, as the saying goes, if it’s not on, it’s not on..so that will be our lot until veraison some time in January 2026.

As soon as we finish pruning I like to schedule a bottling session.

Coordinating bottles, capsules, labels, cartons, heat and cold stabilising and sterile filtering of young wines usually takes over a month of solid work in preparation for a big couple of days.

Except for a nasty hailstorm just as we finished our first days run, it mostly went smoothly and I can report that we have some fine wines safely in bottle for you to enjoy in the years to come.

We also have to check the reds in barrel from vintage 25 to see how they fared over winter in preparation for a racking early in the New Year. As it can get quite cool here soon after vintage in autumn, the occasional late malo-lactic ferment doesn’t progress to complete dryness. When this occurs, we lightly sulphur the wine and transfer it to a completely full stainless steel storage tank and wait for the early spring warmth to finish the job. It’s as if the wine in the winery is talking to the vineyard it came from and they both agree that now is the time to get up and going.

Our wine making philosophy is based around container management and knowing when it is safe to do nothing. It’s not very reductive but there is a certain romance there and it seems to be working over more than four decades of nature calling the shots.

The Rare Earths of Bloodwood

As we deal only in facts here at Bloodwood, we want it to be known that our little patch of gravel and grimace NW of Orange represents 0.000005% of the total 1.9 billion acre land mass of Australia. We are also aware that the synthetic rubber cores of golf balls are made from rare earth synthesised polybutadiene rubber. This stuff has a very high cis-1,4 content which accounts for the excellent rebound characteristics of said balls. Let it also be known that over the last year we have “found” 17 golf balls scattered across Bloodwood. Where they have come from and how they made it to the vineyard is yet to be determined. We are aware of a group of local wine makers who play a weekly round of golf at Duntry League. Now this is our closest golf club, and although they can wack a ball along with the best of them, a miscued drive of over five kilometres would put Karie Webb to shame. So we’ve ruled out dodgy drunken drives. Crows have been suggested, but clever as they are, even I don’t believe they play golf. No, logic seems to suggest that we are not alone here at Bloodwood and if you carefully search your own 100 acres, you too will find 17 golf balls per year. And it seems to me that the number of balls and the retrieval of the rare earths to be found in each and every one of them across our wide brown land would obviate the need to trash our environment in the mining of rare earths. Discuss:

We all have a story and you can see ours and the full range of our wines and recipe recommendations on the Bloodwood web site, or join us for a cellar door tasting next time you are in Orange.

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