A66. The short story.

The plan was and still is, very simple.

Utilise tiny batches of our finest Coonawarra Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon from our decades old family operated vineyards, to make excellent cellar aged wines that we could make available to everyone.

Initiated in vintage 2015, some new Boutes French oak barrels and fermentation space at the Glenroy Community Winery was booked.

We were having an early Thursday evening ute tailgate family dinner at the front of the vineyard shed with the assistant managers - then aged 3 and 5, only a few days before the scheduled picking date the following Tuesday.

As we drove home past the neighbouring vineyard, the assistant managers in the back seat called out ‘What’s that?’ We all looked out at a shiny yellow machine travelling up and down the vine rows.

The ute was turned around and we drove into the neighbour’s vineyard loading pad area to see bins of freshly harvested grapes ready for transport to the winery. With the light fading, a gentle rain beginning to fall and the harvest finishing for the day we peeked into the grape bins to see - just grapes. Nothing else at all-no leaves, bunch stems, vine canes or even leaf petioles. The two assistant managers (and also the manager in the driver’s seat) were very impressed. A very affable Frenchman approached us and introduced himself as the Australian manager for a French vineyard machinery company. He indicated that they were demonstrating their new grape harvester that both destems and crushes the grapes as they are harvested.  We all looked at each other for a bit and then we politely asked if he would be interested in demonstrating his new machine on our Cabernet next Tuesday? ‘Why of course’ was the reply.

For the handpick purists, handpicking is of course a great way to inspect every bunch and reduce potential juice oxidation between the vineyard and the winery. In our situation, with such a small harvest, we can inspect the vines to be picked a few days before harvest and remove any bunches that we do not want. With the winery within sight of the vineyard, destemming and crushing occurs within minutes of harvest. The crusher/destemmer harvester allows us to harvest directly into the 1t open fermenter vessel and saves a great deal of effort shovelling grapes by hand into the winery crusher/destemmer.

That is how we adopted the very latest harvest technology. A ‘What’s that? called out from the back seat by some very observant and curious 3 and 5 year old’s!

Utilising a fantastically expensive machine for a 1t harvest is not viable so unless we are also harvesting other grapes at the same time, we hand pick. Our over half century old shiraz is now rather fragile and we have solely handpicked it for many vintages.

Why ‘A66’? We were driving on the ‘A66’ Riddoch Hwy at the time of the story above, right in front of the highway road sign in our vineyard with A66 in big gold letters on it. This is a great reminder of that very day when we started the ‘very best wine we can make’ project!