Thanks to everyone for sending their food and wine pairing suggestions through to add to our Somerled Wine Days calendar (as per last week’s post).
Here are a couple of my favourites…
Somerled Rose with cheese toasties Day!
Good tasty cheese on Sourdough bread and toasted in the frypan with lots of butter!
Somerled sparkling shiraz and fresh cooked prawns in the shade by the beach in sunny Caloundra.
Christmas morning breaky has to be Sparkling Shiraz and heavily buttered croissants.
The 2020 Shiraz is spectacular, and goes well with cheddar and taco’s…!
And one of my not-so favourites…
Fumé Blanc with a Black Pudding and mustard sandwich.
I’m sorry Froggy, but I can’t see that one catching on. But each to their own, I guess!!
I’ll be in touch for your birthdates, so I can officially add them to our calendar.
While I’ve been focused on the Festive Season, wine holidays and long lunches with friends (today’s cover photo comes courtesy of the beautiful view at Mount Lofty Ranges Vineyard!) it seems the vines have been busy doing what they do best at this time of year – growing grapes!
I can’t believe it’s already time to start thinking about Vintage 2023. It will be on us before we know it, so let’s have a closer look a what’s been happening…
E-L stage
Flowering and set is largely complete across the region.
All varieties are between E-L 29 (Berries pepper-corn size, 4mm diameter) and E-L 31 (Berries pea-size, 7mm diameter).
Now, I’ve been mentioning these E-L stages a lot lately and I thought we should quickly remind ourselves of this chart…
As you can see, we’re progressing through “Berry Formation” and will be heading into “Berry Ripening” in the next few weeks. There is only one thing to do after that… pick the grapes and make some wine!
The warmer weather we’ve been having lately has really helped things along.
Shoot growth has continued strongly and is closing in on the final shoot length for 2021/2 and 2016/17 (see the table below from last week’s CropWatch report).
You can see that since the 30th December (when our weather started to look a bit more like summer!), the red 2022/23 line finally started to catch up with the others.
Go you little red line… you can do it!
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The thing growers need to focus on at the moment is…
Moisture stress
We had so much rain in the early part of this growing season, that I can’t quite believe we even have to talk about this! The thing is, we’ve had little to no rain since then.
The first signs of moisture stress are beginning to show in vines on shallow soils.
The symptoms include yellowing of leaves towards the bottom of the can0py.
These leaves will begin to dry out and die if irrigation is not applied. And even then they need to be watered immediately or they won’t survive (just like after a couple of hot days in your garden).
Once leaves begin to desiccate it is too late to recover them for the season.
When a vine loses leaves, it starts to lose its ability to create the energy required to ripen the berries. Not a good thing when you want them to make wine!
Stay tuned for more Vintage 2023 news!
Until then, I’m going to find another wine holiday to celebrate…