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A vintage hot off the press

One or two warm days in the vineyard mean a world of difference in the glass.

Tony Lee

Illustration: Robin Cowcher.
Illustration: Robin Cowcher.Supplied

In most years here the picking season is like the trusty ute we use for harvest. It's slow to start and can hiccup a bit. Eventually it picks up and chugs along at a regular speed. Different vineyards ripen one by one, letting us keep pace with picking and pressing over several weeks until everything's off the vines.

This year has been different. Harvest season took off like a stolen Ferrari driven by a kid on crystal meth. It happened so quickly we took a while to realise our grapes were off and running, much faster than in recent years, and we needed to give chase.

Until then things were fairly relaxed. Throughout February my brother and I watched the weather and, from time to time, wandered into our vineyards with a stash of plastic zip-lock bags in our pockets. We grow grapes in the paddocks next to my family's farmhouse and at another couple of sites. Our home vineyard is high and cool but the other vineyards are closer to sea level and generally warmer. Like children from the same family, they're treated much the same but behave differently. If we don't keep a close eye on them all at least one will get out of hand.

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That's why vineyard sampling is essential as harvest gets closer. At different spots scattered through each vineyard we pick a few berries from the unripe bunches of grapes before bagging them up to take back to the winery. We squash them, taste them, and peer at the seeds inside before putting them through a bunch of laboratory trials.

The tasting tells us how the grapes' flavour is coming along. The colour of the seeds tips us off about ripeness. Green seeds make for bitter, astringent flavours. Brown seeds say the grapes are pretty much ready to go. The lab tests tell us things we can often guess at but like to quantify: the level of sugar in the grapes, known as the ''brix'', and the pH, a measure of acidity.

All these things change dramatically in a matter of days when the weather is warm. Grapes that are perfect for harvesting one day may be overripe the next. We could press and process them, but the flavours will have changed. With higher sugar levels converting to alcohol, the resulting wine may be hot, but not in a good way. In wine jargon, hot means your glass of wine tastes as though it's had a shot of vodka. Instead of being complex and intriguing, it's shouty and over-the-top: less dinner date, more nightclub pick-up.

Hence we're near-obsessive about regular sampling and trialling in the lead-up to harvest: picking too early makes for green, mean, under-ripe flavours. Too late means no subtlety in the wine. And what we found, midsummer, was that our grapes weren't soldiering slowly on. They were dashing for the finishing line.

By early March, when we looked at the weather forecast, we saw there would be no stopping. A week of maximums above 30 degrees meant there was only one thing to do: get the grapes harvested before they cooked on the vines.

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We are small winemakers and we pick our grapes by hand. Harvesting by night with machines and lights wasn't an option. The only thing for it was to beg our pickers to arrive in the dark and start work at dawn, so they could finish for the day before they roasted along with the grapes. It was important to get the grapes into the winery before the day really warmed up - when bins of picked grapes are left in the sun, fresh flavours start to taste tired.

The rush is over now the weather has settled a bit; picking is almost finished. Shiraz is always a straggler in terms of getting ripe, almost the last we pick, and we always leave some dessert-wine grapes hanging out there. For now, though, we're glad of a bit of cool. So hot right now? We're so glad it's not.

What we're drinking

A generous relative sent us a bottle of Tyrrell's 2005 Vat 1 semillon so festooned with gold medals we could barely read the label. It was sublime and if we could afford to, we'd drink it all the time. Our budget semillon of choice is from the same Hunter Valley stable, Tyrrell's 2011 Lost Block.

Tony Lee makes wine for Foxeys Hangout, Mornington Peninsula.

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