With the help of family, friends and the Albury Wine Club, we completed this years harvest on Saturday. It was a great effort all round but particular thanks must go to Alex, JB, Peter and Benoît, who worked tirelessly throughout the harvest.
Overall this year's harvest was a great success, with a yield of nearly 25 tonnes of clean top quality fruit (compared to only 3 tonnes last year!).
As a result of the growing season being late, sugars were a bit low so we decided to leave any unripe grapes on the vines. Quality sparkling wine is made from fairly acidic grape juice anyway, so we have every confidence that the Albury Estate sparkling 2013 will be a great bubbly. The flavour of the juice is excellent and full of phenolic ripeness. Sadly we will have to wait until 2016 to find out just how good it will be; once the wine is made it will be bottled early next year for secondary fermentation and left for at least two years to give it fizz and character.
We picked only the ripest bunches of pinots for our Silent Pool Rosé which should be released towards the end of May next year.
We will have a bit of a break during the rest of November but in December pruning starts for all 21,000 vines and the whole process will start again! Fortunately Alex loves pruning!
Congratulations. A remarkable success!
ReplyDeleteI left some unripe bunches of pinot noir as an experiment. They turned sour and rotted
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