Cam’s blog…

It’s my usual springtime blog post. Complaining about the weather and musing about planting.

To be fair we’ve had quite a good run weather wise. Mid-20’s Celcius at the end of April is fine by me, it’d just be nice if it stayed for longer than a couple of days. It’s just the wind this past weekend, can we please have less of that? The planting team looked like they’d been sandblasted!

I’m not going to jinx the year as I did in 2012, we planted that year in blazing sunshine, with temperatures pushing 30C. It all fell apart after I said we needed rain, it pretty much rained non-stop all that summer.

Tractor

Budburst this year has raced through, with the whole vineyard completing budburst in under ten days, mainly due to that previously mentioned warm weather at the end of April. Compare this to last year and it took weeks to go through. This won’t affect things too much over the whole season, as the vines tend to even themselves out as the season goes on, but it is nice to have all the blocks so even at this time of year.

This year’s planting has gone relatively smoothly, despite planting some of the steepest areas on the whole farm. It all looks very impressive but also makes us a very large site now. For instance, it takes 35 minutes to walk from one end of the vineyard to the other, a distance of 1.9 miles or 3 kilometres. This new planting of another 90,000 vines now takes us to a total of 91 hectares planted (224 acres in old money).

And we launched our new sparkling wines this week at the Ritz Hotel and at the Tasting Room – Cheers.

Tractor Driver

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