THIRD SWATHE PICKED THIS MORNING

Coffee. Open the kitchen blinds. I couldn't stay inside when I saw the dust of the pickers driving in at first light today. They picked a third swathe of the Yangarra High Sands Grenache next door. Very fit specialists these people, highly selective and quick. 

These grapes will emerge in the Old Vine Grenache.

When it got too warm in the late morning, like too hot for good humans to be moving fresh-cut (ouch) fruit around in the sun they retired. They'll be back in the cool of dawn. 

My neighbour Bernard Smart planted these vines in 1946. They've never been irrigated, and although they never had much more then sulphur before, they've had no conventional industrial poison since Yangarra's conversion began to fully licensed biodynamic and organic management almost a decade ago.

These are highly resilient plants and consistent producers of modest amounts of beautiful fruit. You can't get these flavours anywhere else. 

I love the way the Grenache leaves feel as thick as chamois. Without the prophylactic skein of petrochem, the plant seems to stack on more protective lignin over years, making it tougher with thicker-skinned fruit.

This high dune is wind-blown sand (æolean, not marine), deposted in the last few thousand years. It varies in depth and was known to move, as dunes do when bare, in the block next door in 1947-8. 

Below that is a layer of ferruginous clay. Then there's ironstone, and below that coarse Maslin sand (Eocene Epoch 34-56 million years ago) all the way down to the 500+ million year rocks beneath. 

The old vine roots have gone straight down to the clay, where they feed and drink. Perfect.

 Here's Bernard and Mary Smart with Yangarra boss Peter Fraser ... below that Bernard and their son Wayne in the priceless Grenache Bernard's grandfather planted in the same sort of sand - although shallow - on the top of the higher ridge to the north. 

The hotrod Grenache makers of the south queue for their tonne of Bernard's grapes. And so they friggin should. 

[PS to Bernard:sell 10% of your fruit at Grange prices. You might sell that bit first.]