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,...

Friends and neighbours Grant McRostie and Russ Bryant have decided to plant vines: 2 acres of Chardonnay this year, from which we plan to...

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...

We have been growing Pinot for twenty years; in three more we should have our own Chardonnay. The imperative to make Champ – I mean...

A lightning tour of the vineyard courtesy of our dog Molly.

A season in pictures at the Mount Terrible vineyard.

Every year, to maximise the quality of our Pinot, we severely strip shoots and bunches. But vines are philoprogenitive as buggery: kill...

went perfectly and is now sleeping in barrel. Not the easiest of years because a cold snap around flowering impaired fruit set, reducing...

a really good season. Someone must have told the vines how close they got to being bulldozed when I went temporarily blind last year. The...

We thought 2015 was a very good year, but we have only just realised how good. The grapes were handpicked and sorted and chilled...

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen: five good vintages in a row. I was getting nervous. But on Saturday March 18 we picked 6...

Where the Gods live, obviously…

Everybody knows specialised winemaking equipment is going to be expensive. Planting a vineyard and building a winery, you can save a fair...

In 2007 and again in 2009 we did not make any wine because the vineyard was blanketed with smoke from bushfires. Noxious chemicals in...

It probably isn’t a good idea to be writing newsletters in mid-winter. Pruning day in day out doesn’t put you in the sunniest frame of...

The season got off to a bad start: a hard frost later than any previously recorded in this district. I remember waking up on the morning...

If we didn’t cover the grapes with fully occlusive netting they would all be eaten by Little Ravens, Currawongs and Bower Birds. The job...

It’s five feet long and it takes no prisoners, but it beats the hell out of a week with secateurs.

I was consolidating pallets in the cellar the other week when I came across 12 cases of my first vintage, the 06, that weren’t supposed...

was the culmination of a very good season. A wet winter ushered in a mild spring with below average rainfall. Generally dry conditions...