Planting a few vines in your own patch of dirt is the stuff of dreams for those pursuing the romantic notion of making a little bit of home brew for themselves. But for those who choose viticulture for a livelihood, planting and maintaining a profitable vineyard is no place for dreamers.
Anyone who visited Tasmania's drought-ravaged East Coast last August will remember all too clearly the looks of anguish that accompanied grower predictions of their forthcoming year in the vineyard. For many, only the drenching rains of September 2019 averted what looked like becoming a potentially disastrous journey to vintage.
You don't need green fingers to grow a grapevine. But planting a vineyard and growing a wine business is a different matter entirely. That requires countless hours of careful thought and planning, not the least of which includes matching grapevines to soil types and climatic conditions.
The cool, damp conclusion to Tasmania's 2020 vintage may have diverted our attention recently, but data collected by the Australian Government's Bureau of Meteorology indicate last summer was the country's second warmest on record. The mean maximum temperature for the three-month period was 2.11ºC warmer than average.
Like bookmakers and accountants, winemakers seem to have unlimited capacity for storing numbers in their heads. Ghost Rock's Justin Arnold can regale you with all manner of detail if you want to chew over a wine's technical merits.
If you felt like hiding under the doona for a few more minutes this morning, spare a thought for Absolute Viticulture's Marty Smith. The chances are that by the time your feet finally hit the floor, the consultant viticulturist and vineyard contractor will have already spent an hour or so mulling over weather maps and busy work schedules.
When you're a winemaker who's just spent recent months working 12 or more hours a day, seven days a week, it can be hard to sum up how vintage turned out this year. Much of it passes as an unbroken sequence of grapes in, money out.
As a teenager used to life outdoors on a northern Tasmanian sheep farm, Peter Caldwell might have been expected to run a mile from any part-time job involving routine tasks and attention to detail.
Laying the foundations for a successful wine business takes much more than a good bit of vineyard dirt and a state-of-the-art winery facility. It requires vision, passion and tenacious spirit. These are the human elements that make the wine world go around.
Cessnock, Mudgee, Rutherglen, Clare, Coonawarra and Tanunda. Six centres of renown in Australia's eastern wine states. Hot, dry, grape-growing country. Spot the odd one out?
