The 2023 Vintage
"What's good for the pastures is bad for the vines." (Montaigne, FYI). After a third La Nina summer, by hanging on till April, we were...
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Oct 8, 2023
From Graves to the Cradle
A tree fell in the forest. To be specific, an American Red Pine, the last of four planted in 1900 to mark the boundaries of the Jamieson...
Dec 11, 2022
Good Things Come In Small Packages
La Nina, the Negative Indian Ocean Dipole and the South Polar Vortex hate me. It’s mutual. Pax to the marketing departments at Chateau...
Dec 11, 2022
James Halliday's Top 100 wines
Rose. Strictly between ourselves I used to think of it as a bit of a sissy girls’ drink. Then, in 2020 when we were shrouded in bushfire...
Oct 27, 2022
My Birdfriend's Back
♫ Hey-la, hey-la, My Birdfriend’s Back! ♫ Well, it’s possible he’s not the same lyrebird. But it cheered me up no end when I was putting...
Oct 22, 2022
It was the best of years......
.. it was the worst of years. I'm not referring to COVID, the war in Europe, the global economic crisis or the rise of autocracy. And I...
Sep 1, 2021
Wine and Cheese, Anyone?
In 1990, my old friend Ian Roberton, who is a judge at the UK Cheese Awards and the World Cheese Awards, founded Meribel Fine Foods, a...
Jul 29, 2021
I Get Around......
Xi-Who-Must-be-Obeyed has banned us, but while it’s still legal I still get around: It’s OK! I saved the Mount Terrible! Shiver me...
Jun 29, 2021
Dionysus Descending
Guess what I got for my, er, my most recent birthday. Plan is to upload videos to show how things evolve over the course of one season....
Apr 29, 2021
The 2021 Vintage
Swings and roundabouts. From the viticultural (if no other) point of view, 2021 was a very, very good year. But instead of 50 of our...
Dec 28, 2020
Never Trust a Man who doesn't Drink
2020 ... What to say? Pandemics, B J and Brexit, the Donald: the grim news has been relentless. Not much to try and be funny about with...
Oct 31, 2020
Donald vs The Stripper
Water shoots, unwanted green shoots that spring from buds on the vine trunk and divert energy from fruitful shoots on the cordon: they’re...
Oct 31, 2020
Cold Rain and Snow
I know you can fake this kind of thing with Photoshop, but I’m not that smart: we really did have snow here last month. Last time that...
Aug 31, 2020
Spring (is sprung)
I've always been reluctant to blow my own trumpet. Something to do with being beaten up in the playground while the Christian Brothers...
Aug 1, 2020
Cane Pruning
Rick Kinzbrunner from Gianconda, Lee Duffy from E E Muir, Ben Rose from Toolangi all told me I should. Richard Smart’s been banging on...
Jul 11, 2020
The Beast
As The Regular Reader (thank you, Mother) of these Posts will remember, this time last year we proudly announced our acquisition of an...
Apr 21, 2020
The 2020 Vintage
2020: where to begin? November brought high winds and a cold snap at flowering which affected fruit set. This was followed by extreme...
Apr 20, 2020
Rose 2020
By mid-January it was not looking good. For weeks we'd been on high alert for fires. Then came smoke. We'd gone through all this before,...
Sep 19, 2019
Two New Vineyards
Friends and neighbours Grant McRostie and Russ Bryant have decided to plant vines: 2 acres of Chardonnay this year, from which we plan to...
Aug 31, 2019
Olive Oil
For more than twenty years we have been growing olives and leaving them for the birds. Janene has had a couple of goes at pickling olives...
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