Hi this is Emma! I’m the other Moody daughter and – having timed my annual holiday to the Hills during vintage – I am totally schooled up in what dad’s up to! I’ve been following him around in an invasive manner to find out all the details for you, and Maree is letting me borrow the blog so I can tell you!
So last thing we all knew, the harvesters were marching in to pick the Pinot Noir from our Charleston vineyards.
And march in they did! At 3am, at zero degrees, and with Rob in a very warm leather jacket supervising!
This particular harvester is actually quite fancy. As well as plucking the fruit from the vine, it actually destems the fruit too. You might remember, this process usually happens later on in the winery rather than on the machine itself. It’s efficient and gentle on the fruit to have it as part of the harvesting process on the actual machine though – fabulous technology:
The fruit looks really good, even though the harvester did pick up a few hard green grapes, which we weren’t expecting. However, since they’re so physically hard, they won’t crush and disrupt the beautiful juice, they’ll just sink to the bottom and separate out.
Once in the winery, the juice and fruit was tipped straight into a small open fermenter rather than having to go in via the crusher – that makes it gentle for the fruit.
Yeast was added after a day’s soaking. And here it is looking delightful:
What about my Somerled bubbly? Where is it?
A cry I am often inclined to whimper when I realise I have run out and live half way around the world!
Our baby 2019 bubbles is looking fantastic, thanks to dad, yet again.
We went up to Summertown on Saturday morning and picked in what seemed like incredible heat – it was about 40 in the city that day:
And here’s Paul Henschke on the quad zipping up and down the rows. The pickers fill the milk crates with bunches, and Paul zooms along collecting them on the back of the quad, to take them up to the top of the vineyard to add to the big bins, where they’ll stay til the truck comes to take them to the winery:
The cellar hands are here raking the fruit into the hoppers, which feed the new fruit to the elevators which take them straight to the top of the press! Doesn’t this look like something you’d quite like to drink while celebrating in a few years’ time?
SO much action around here this week! And dad’s still managed to make it to all the lunches and dinners we’ve had planned for the family, even if it did mean getting up two hours after we’d all gone to bed to supervise picking in the dark!
Cheers dad.
And just to cap off the week, here’s how our little sauvie is going:
Remember how stunningly green the juice was last week? Other wordly.
It’s sitting at 6 degrees at this moment, so all the grape solids are sitting on or near the bottom of the tank. Next step is to bring the temp up to about 10C, add the yeast and away goes the fermentation!
Happy to meet you, Sauvie 2019 and Fume 2019!
Can’t wait to have you in my wine fridge ….
Thanks for having me visit you on the blog, and I’ll try to drag dad out to lunch again now in between him peeping over all of the fermenters at the winery! Wish me luck!
Emma xo
Sparkling red wines were probably better than whites back then. Seppelts Great Western and Minchinbury were the two big producers in the early 70s. They were probably doing 50% red and 50% white. Although with the advent of Cold Duck (what a terrible name!) which was a sweet sparkling red produced by Kaiser Stuhl in the Barossa it became undignified to drink sparkling red.
’55 Grange – it got so many trophies and gold medals you can’t fit them on the label.
“Ummm, here…?!”
To get a foot into the industry, Rob posted letters to the major producers – Orlando, Hardy’s, Penfolds and so on. Who was the only one to answer? 
Mechanical harvesters work by moving along the row and shaking the vines. This movement causes the berries to fall off their stalks.
when the grapes have reached their desired ripeness and need to be removed quickly. Secondly, these machines can pick through the night when temperatures are cooler. As we know, oxidation can occur at higher temperatures, so picking at night is often a better option if daytime temperatures are high. Ideally, grapes should be picked at an ambient temperature of between 8 and 16 degrees Celcius.
Rob always hand picks his Pinot Noir for Sparkling and Rose along with his Sauvignon Blanc.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Somerled story, it starts with Stephen – a successful horseman. On April 20th, 1908 at the Oakbank Picnic Races in the Adelaide Hills, he rode a horse called Somerled, winning the Amateur Steeplechase by 20 lengths.
The excitement of vintage seemed like only yesterday. But this week, the first of our 2018 wines was bottled! Here are the first boxes of our Somerled 2018 Sauvignon Blanc hot off the bottling line!
Another unique feature in the production of apera is the use of a solera system. Barrels of wine are arranged in a pyramid-like stack with the youngest wine in the top layer and the oldest wine in the bottom layer. At bottling time, the wine to be bottled is removed from barrels in the bottom layer of the solera, taking only a small portion. Then each cask is refreshed from the layer above. This results in a progressive mixing of young wine with older wine, a process known as ‘refreshing the wine’.
“So, I could immediately see a great future for our Somerled apera as a wine modelled on the Spanish Palo Cortado style – and that’s the way it’s going. It’s now over 9 years old, and has been in barrel for nearly all that time. The flor yeast film has long disappeared, but the flor influence is still there, just as it is in the old Spanish Palo Cortados. It has deepened further in colour, so that it has a lovely golden tint with a touch of the tawny, and the aromas and flavours are incredibly lifted.