“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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20 February 2012

VINTAGE 2012 KICKS OFF AT YANGARRA




The Olivers of Taranga are usually the first to arrive with their beautiful fruit; they choose to make their top wines at Yangarra.  L-R Corrina Wright, Briony Oliver and Don Oliver.  Last year they celebrated their family's 170th vintage

This whole bunch Shiraz was left in airtight bins with CO2 for a few days, to give the natural yeast carbonic maceration ferment a chance to kick in before de-stemming. Photos by Philip White.

 
Into the hopper; adjusting the sorter.
 
The first stalks of vintage.

The stems go off to the mulch heap. Once it's strained, shlooshy waste and hose-down water goes through the new reed-bed filtering tanks which are old rainwater storage vessels half-filled with graded sand and planted with reeds. Before the invention of the sorting machine, which is still a very rare beast in Australia, most of this this stuff went/goes through the fermenter, straight into your glass.

  


Here they come!
 

Caviar: off to the fermenter

2 comments:

Vineyard Paul said...

Sorting Machine, I want.

Will have to persist by hand for our 4 tonne :)

DRINKSTER said...

It IS an amazing invention! It'll sort four tonnes an hour. The stuff it finds in the cleanest-looking fruit is scary. I did a piece (with more photographs) just after its installation in 2010:

http://www.drinkster.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/vaucher-beguet-rewrites-history.html