The Last of the Wine?

We’ve had a good run at Mount Terrible. And we’ve had a lot of fun doing it.

But all good things must come to an end. The thirty-odd years Janene and I have spent in

this beautiful valley have been the best of years. Living beside a gin-clear river and

surrounded by vines has been an extraordinary privilege.

We built our vineyard up from nothing. It’s hard to contemplate leaving it. But needs must.

Attention to detail, in both the vineyard management and the winemaking, has enabled us to maintain the quality of our wines these last twenty years. But it involves a lot of work. Come the day I can no longer care for them, the vines will run wild and turn this place into a jungle.

So two years ago Janene and I decided to be sensible and – I love a statistical cliché – stay

ahead of the curve.

This Could be the Last Time, I was humming to myself, when our friends came to help with

the 2024 vintage. We’d signed a contract the month before to sell Mount Terrible as a going

concern. The buyer praised the beauty of this valley, recognised its viticultural and tourist

potential, was keen to carry on our winemaking co-op and talked about building a cellar

door/restaurant and holiday accommodation. In short, he was going to do all the things we

would have done if we were twenty years younger and had the resources.

Eighteen months on and the sale has fallen through. After initial reassurance this was just a

minor cash-flow problem, there followed four successive proposals for variations to the

contract, all of which we accepted and all of which the buyer sequentially dishonoured. Last

month we made the painful decision to remove four fifths of our vines.

I’m not going to show you pictures, the site looks bleak just now. But the land will heal. And

reducing our workload means Janene and I won’t have to move away. I plan to keep making

wine on a more modest scale. And I predict the wine will be all the better for that.