Vineyards rise to challenges

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.

In the warm, dry south of the State, producers have been scrambling to keep up with the growth and ripening of their fruit since mid-summer.

"We've only had about a month of harvesting to date and our sparkling wine grapes – and those of our clients – are all picked now, and so are many of the white varieties," explained Frogmore Creek Chief Winemaker Alain Rousseau (pictured below).

"We started picking on the 22nd of February and it's been an unbelievable vintage so far. Early ripening hasn't just been a feature of warm regions like the Coal River Valley and the Tamar Valley. This year we've already received white wine grapes for still table wines from several vineyards in the north-west of the State.

"Sites which have a very cool climate and are not normally picked until much later on in the season. That's very, very unusual."

Rousseau speaks with a voice of experience. He grew up on his family's vineyard in France's celebrated Loire Valley, and has made wine on two continents. This is his 25th vintage in Australia. And like his industry peers, he's been surprised by some of the idiosyncrasies of the 2016 harvest as Tasmania's 300 or so vineyards responded to the warm, dry summer and picker-friendly autumn.

"Ripening has been all over the place," he added.

"Sauvignon Blanc has been very early this year. On some sites, we've been picking Riesling at the same time as we've been picking Pinot Noir. That's unusual, too. Riesling is a late-ripener. We usually pick it several weeks after the Pinot Noir."

Long-term growers on the East Coast have not only called it an unusual vintage, they've said the writing was on the wall back in mid-2015. Many sites up and down the coast had the coldest winter since 1966, and it was drier than the long-term average as well.

Conditions still seemed out-of-the-ordinary with the arrival of spring. Indeed, the season turned out to be the second warmest since 1914 and was very dry. Strong winds during October compounded the dryness.

With flowering and fruit-set powering on unaffected by cloud cover or cool daytime temperatures, yields there look likely to be much better than average.

Big crops or not, fruit ripeness on the East Coast has sped along at a rapid rate. Summer turned out to be the warmest on record.

Stand by for some very special parcels of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot if the favourable weather continues for the late-season varieties.

More immediate is the need to catch up and get on top of harvest schedules.

"Our picking regimes have been pretty jumbled up this year," added renowned Tasmanian viticulturist and vineyard consultant, Fred Peacock (pictured below).

"We've seen some really nice fruit this year. But it's often been picked in something of an erratic order when you consider what normally happens during harvest.

"Riesling in particular has continued to respond to the warmer growing seasons of the past 15 years or so by ripening a fair bit earlier. We don't understand why, but in some places, blocks have ripened and have been ready to pick earlier than Pinot Noir."

By as much as two-and-a-half weeks earlier in the South East.

"That's not something that's peculiar to vintage 2016, though," Peracock continued.

"So far as Riesling is concerned, generally that's been a good thing because it's allowed us to take some of the risk out of growing it. It also means that the wines we make from the variety don't have the very high acidities of the past, when we had to leave a little bit of sweetness in them to make them more balanced and consumer-friendly." 

Nowadays the owner of Bream Creek Vineyard overlooking Marion Bay, Peacock first became involved in Tasmanian viticulture in the 1970s when he was a horticultural officer with what was then the Department of Agriculture.

During a working life spanning four decades, the industry professional has helped plan and oversee the establishment of vineyards in every one of the State's seven major wine-growing areas.

He says recent changes in growing seasons and vine behaviour have given him and his peers plenty to think about when considering how established and potential sites and varieties in Tasmania might perform in the future if forecast changes to the State's climate and weather patterns ring true.

"I think there are probably a few places south of Hobart – in the Huon Valley and in part of the Channel region, for example – where you'd now look a bit more closely for vineyard development than you would have done in the past," he said.

"Some sites previously considered to be high-risk might be okay now if you didn't stray too far from planting Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and accepting the options they provide for producing sparkling as well as table wine."

Keeping watch on the weather hasn't been the only thing on producers' minds in the North West and North of the State this vintage.

The dry conditions experienced in 2015 proved especially problematic when storm fronts crossed Tasmania on 13 and 14 January and sparked a vast number of bushfires in the West and North West. Further lightning strikes near the end of the month continued the blazes.

Ghost Rock's owner Colin Arnold said smoke from the bushfires was the worst he had seen during his 15 years of vineyard ownership. The timing couldn't be worse, with grape berries beginning to soften during veraison, making them especially susceptible to smoke taint.

In addition to making atmospheric conditions unpleasant for vineyard workers, high levels of bushfire smoke can render grape harvests totally unsuitable for winemaking. Tainted fruit results in tainted wine.

"We only need one big fire and a lot of smoke right now and we'd really be in trouble," Arnold said.

Estimates given by the Tasmanian Fire Service suggest more than 120,00ha of vegetation had been burnt by the recent spate of fires.

"Years like this have really tested my resolve," said Robert Richter, co-owner of Grey Sands Vineyard at Glengarry, just at the edge of the West Tamar.

"We had five days of smoke haze, making our view of Mt Arthur look more like Mt Mordor, out of Lord of the Rings. No colour in the fruit yet, so smoke taint is unlikely. But the smoky gloom hasn't aided my mood.

"At one point, we even packed the car with some important/sentimental things as a precaution, just in case we had to leave in a hurry, despite the fires being probably 50km away."

That situation had no sooner eased when the vineyard was hit by a 180mm torrential downpour on 18 January.

"It was the heaviest rain I have seen here on the property," Richter noted

"It came so fast and hard that it ended up mainly being run-off. It probably delivered only the equivalent of 25mm of steady rain. We were actually grateful for the rainfall as our vines are dry-grown."

Roll on winter 2016.

First published in abridged form: Tasmanian Farmer, March 2016

Last page update: 31 January 2026