Harvest 2019

Another harvest has come and gone and the wine is safely in tank bubbling away in fermentation.  This is an exciting time of year for a winemaker – some might say it’s the creative apex of the year. 

Fermentation is an explosion of life – literally billions of individual yeast alive and creating flavours and textures and winescapes in the matrix of what will be the 2019 vintage.  Their lives as short as they are (most fermentations are complete within 10 days) fill the winery and I believe the winemaker’s soul with a positive energy.

That creative energy is infectious and it fills us with enough spirit to make the rest of the working year possible.  I can never quite understand why winemakers would choose to become executive or consulting winemakers and leave the cellarwork behind.  

I’m not judging it’s just my perspective, my lens – but I feel as a winemaker I need to be in the winery when fermentation is happening so that I can soak up that life energy.  It’s a baseline for life – it’s mindfulness in its purest form. It’s just happening and it’s pure creative fire. It helps that it’s beautiful aromatically of course. Fermentation wouldn’t be something you’d want to be around if the yeast weren’t creating delicious aromas and flavours.

Highlights from this year all centred around the harvest of our own grapes. It’s a transition year where our own grapes sort of took the spotlight. The next two years will see our vineyard production grow exponentially and that’s exciting. 

For me personally the Zweigelt grape (that’s the one in the picture for this blog) is the star of the show. It’s such a beautiful grape in the vineyard and it’s perfect for our site and soils. It was a low heat and low sugar year but somehow the Zweigelt managed to come in on target at 23 brix (a measurement of grape sugars and ripeness) which is very exciting.  We can’t wait to see what it will do in a high sugar year.

We also harvested Pinot Noir and our mixed white block of Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Gewurztraminer.  All of which came in on the low sugar side of things but well within the parameters for fine wine.  What I would expect from the 2019 vintage is great wines with lower alcohol percentages. That’s not a bad thing. It could actually make this vintage exceptional.  Oddly enough with a lot of the varieties the acid was slightly lower as well which means there might be a good balance between the lower alcohols and lower acidity/structure.

At any rate we are pleased and although we are looking towards the future here at Marionette we are also living in the moment by enjoying the ferment and warming our hands against all of its fire of life.