Looks like another tricky year:
record December heat brought veraison much earlier than ever
by PHILIP WHITE
Welcome back. While you were away drinking - I trust it
was good - something very interesting occurred. 2016 nearly happened in 2015.
At Vinexpo, the essential winebiz show in Bordeaux, in
about 1992, I witnessed Hunter Valley winemaker Philip Shaw talking with the
Austrian stickymeister, Willie Opitz. They spoke of one vintage in which Opitz
picked his alpine botrytis wine the year after its vintage date and Shaw had
picked a lot of his conventional Upper Hunter fruit the year before. Between
them, north and south, they came close to having a twelvemonth without a
harvest: While the Austrian vintage was very late, the Hunter was very early.
Both eventually marketed their wine labelled with the year they would have
preferred to pick: the year in which neither of them picked much at all.
In Australia, the 2016 vintage has come very close to
starting in 2015. For some in the warmest regions, it probably did. They'll
stay schtum.
While harvest has well-and-truly commenced in some parts
of the irrigated Murray-Darling Basin, record vintage rains in the
sub-tropical Hunter have dramatically slowed its ripening and picking. Not only does ripening reverse as the vines take a huge drink, but the vineyards with looser soils become muddy and impassable for human pickers and machines.
In the major profit-making regions of Barossa and McLaren
Vale, the record-breaking pre-Christmas heatwave came close to making 2016 the
earliest vintage yet. What prevented that, or has prevented it so far, was the
tendency for vines to close down their metabolism in extreme heat. They put
their energy into the survival of the entire plant, not merely ripening their fruit.
If they're short of water, they'll eventually drop leaves to reduce their
evaporative surface area rather than make grapes.
The merciful post-Christmas cool, with the odd sprinkle
of rain, has seen many of these early vineyards get back on with pumping their
energy into ripening the grapes, and veraison is happening.
photo Steve Lindner
This is where the grapes begin to soften and change
colour.
Vines have evolved to survive. Before humans began
helping with this by planting cuttings, the only way the plant could procreate
was through its seeds.
Before the seed has developed sufficiently to germinate,
its protective sac - the berry - maintains a tough bitter skin and a pulp so
packed with acid it works as a deterrent to predators. But once that seed is
ready to shoot, the grape turns off its acid production, begins to make sugar,
and changes from an unsavoury green to a more alluring colour, principally to
attract hungry predators like birds, foxes and humans.
Critter devours grape; seed sprouts in warm belly ready
to take root once it's ejected in a scat of handy fertiliser; species survives.
Clever.
What the vine didn't foresee was the human addiction to
alcohol. Our love of wine sees us planting vines all over the world by using
cuttings, not seeds. Inadvertently, the vine has watched us apply our secondary
industry to its primary effort and plant it much more widely than ever it could
have spread if totally reliant on the sprouting of its seeds in incubating
gizzards.
But while seeds have largely become redundant to the
vine, please don't tell it, lest it cease producing them. We need those seeds.
We take advantage of their preservative tannins by leaving them in the ferment.
Or, like with Riesling, we quickly press the juice away and let the seeds rot
in marc heaps, often for fertiliser which goes back into further vinous
propagation.
Reports of the earliest veraison known in Barossa and
McLaren Vale began trickling in from rattled growers in mid-December. Even in
the cool Yarra Valley some Pinot vines were colouring-up at Christmas.
Now it's widespread across the country: many weeks
earlier than usual in most places.
All those vignerons who'd normally be frying with a beer
on the beach at Port Willie, expecting another month of indolence, are
nervously leaving their tribes there while they get back to cleaning wineries,
hiring hosedraggers and arranging pickers.
Which is another trouble. Most seasoned advisors agree
with my suggestion that when it comes, this vintage will likely be quick and short in
most vignobles. Which means those who haven't got their vendageurs nailed and
waiting to get their schnipses flashing could be in trouble. That labour force
has been booked and secured by the more diligent growers, so their crop will be
picked at the right time. Those who haven't secured such pickers are the ones
whose alcohols hit sixteen or worse in hot harvests.
This occurs just as much with machine harvesters. Those
who own them will use them at the optimum time, only then making them available
to less fortunate or lazier others.
Wineries will very quickly fill up. Once they're full, fruit will be left hanging to over-ripen.
The danger being that we'll have a year of awkward jammy
gloop (unfashionable) or more elegant wine made by hitting those tanks of gloop
with the black snake (water hose), which is illogically illegal.
One thing I've noticed in my neck of the woods is the
difference between the big industrial vineyards and those which get a lot more
personal love and attention. Since the welcome advent of organic and biodynamic
viticulture, this gap has widened. Vineyards which have had several years now
to live without the mindless coddling prophylactic of the petrochem regime are
generally much tougher. Even the leaves get thicker in some vineyards; they seem to produce more toughening lignin. Without
the endless chemical fungicides, herbicides and fertilisers which make
industrial vineyards more monocultural, mundane and drug dependent, the more
beloved vine gardens seem better able to handle extremes such as we see now.
Still tough, bitter and green on the first day of 2016: biodynamic/organic Shiraz in the Ironheart Vineyard near Kangarilla in McLaren Vale ... photo Philip White
Which is not to say those with later veraison will make
better wine. A lot can happen yet ... one risk is bushfire smoke taint: this spoilage is much more destructive after veraison, when the skins are softer and more permeable. Tough little green berries are almost immune to it.
I generalise, but these vineyards grown as they were
before the post-war advent of petrochem seem capable of surviving with less
water, showing less obvious heat stress. They are more naturally
disease-resistent. Even their veraison is later.
Whether this nuggetty resilience will see them through
the unprecedented heatwaves to come remains to be seen, but I can tell that you
already know where my money sits.
Way beyond smoke taint: these grapes are fried! Bushfire damage in Currency Creek, on the Murray-Darling estuary, in January 2013. Not only did the vines burn, but when the power failed and the pumps turned off, in the hotter spots the dripper lines dried out and burnt like cordite fuses, spreading the fire along the mulch lines, right below the fruit-filled canopies ... In December 2015, another bushfire came dangerously close to these same vineyards, but because the berries were well short of veraison and the winds were merciful, problems with smoke taint are unlikely ... photos Philip White
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