Wine comes in three basic colours, according to Harry Eyres' amusing Bluff Your Way in Wine. The first, of course, is red, which we're told ranges from purple to light brown. Next comes white, which in fact is usually pale yellow. Then finally comes rosé, 'which is to be avoided at all costs,' Eyres writes.
When Jim Chatto was appointed chief winemaker at Mount Pleasant in the Hunter Valley in 2013, he trudged through kilometre after kilometre of its old vineyards in order to get to know the place. He already knew its history.
"Is it difficult making wine?" someone once asked Clare Valley producer Dr John Wilson. "Not at all," came the blunt reply. "Any fool can make wine. The hard part is selling it. It requires a special sort of fool to sell wine."
Fast and furious. That's a ready summary of 2016's harvest season, according to Tasmania's winemaking fraternity. Fast and furious, and unusually compacted in terms of the time required for wine grapes to achieve full maturity and ripeness needed for winemaking.
Barely 20 minutes' drive from Hobart and home to the heritage town of Richmond, the Coal River Valley enjoys a cool temperate climate with an abundance of summer sunshine and a generally dry autumn. So it's no surprise that niche farming – including winegrowing – has been a big success since it first emerged here in the 1970s.
Few cellar doors in Tasmania offer the quality of visitor experience that's provided when you stop by Home Hill, 35km south of Hobart. The facility not only boasts a well-appointed wine service area - with staff that are knowledgeable and friendly – it's barely a grape toss from the vineyard's award-winning restaurant.
Few times are more stressful in the life of a wine producer than the last couple of weeks before vintage. But there was no need for the owners of Granton's Derwent Estate to worry unduly about processing their 2015 crop. Everything was hunky-dory in the company's new straw-bale winery.
Three gold medals and two trophies, including the Chairman's Selection Trophy for Best Wine of Show. Those were the attention-grabbing results for Dawson & James Wines at the 2015 Tasmanian Wine Show judged in Hobart in January.
With countless bare vines across the State now enjoying their winter dormancy, July is normally a fairly quiet time in the vineyard. But not this month. If you'd been a fly on the wall at Bay of Fires winery on Friday, you would have probably heard a whole lot of whooping and a-hollering going on.
Vineyards are renowned for transforming people's lives. One minute they're just sticks and ploughed earth, and the next thing you know they're a maze of shoots and leaves, with grapes galore. And that's the fun part, say Ghost Rock owners Alicia Peardon and Justin Arnold.
