by Graeme Leith
Half-asleep I hear lots of sounds of excited children’s voices; the Grahams must have arrived with their grenache and their jolly retinue of pickers and kids. I arise, we crush the grenache and we add the yeast culture to the pinot, Susie doing the vats and me the Fermenta bags (although I miscalculate and the last one gets only about half the dose).
Everyone has assembled for ‘Pino’clock’. Work’s finished by about 6 p.m., so I rat around in the ‘cellar’ under the stairs and get out some golden oldies—the 1997 Bronze Medal Pinot that Greg Bennett made from Kingower fruit, the original 2000 Three Wise Men experimental one, and some 2002 Coldstream, as well as a few early shiraz cabs of ours. It’s a tradition to open a few of these old beauties during the pickers’ weekends; they appreciate being able to taste them and it gives me a chance to look at them without bottle remnants going to waste. Of course, drinking a bit of wine also makes people happier than they would otherwise be.
Vicky Scotland has made a delicious stew; we remove the pieces of meat for the vegetarian, Will. Young Daylesford vegetarians don’t seem to be all that fussy anyway, and I’m sure the meat juices will be good for him. We have a great meal, tell lots of jokes and go to bed early.
Robert McKernan has rung, he’s definitely picking tomorrow—which means more than 5 tons arriving tomorrow night. It’s not much for him; he’s changed some of his pruning and maybe that’s caused a lighter crop.
Thursday, 8 April
Wake at 5 a.m., before the alarm goes off, turn the big outside light on ready for the truck to collect our bins to take to Axedale for the mechanically harvested fruit. Hear the truck coming down Billygoat Hill and Stuart arrives at 6.01 a.m. Give him a coffee after we load the bins on, and off he goes to Axedale, more than an hour away. Vanessa is hand-plunging, we unload the press, and try out my new trailer to take the skins and pips from beneath the press (needs a little modification).
Someone has mislaid the key for the big pump control box; they must have decided someone was going to steal it. City people! It turns up later in somebody’s pocket as I’m getting the angle grinder out.
Reload the press and start pressing—but hey, there’s wine overflowing from the press sump! The beautiful new pump has failed, it won’t respond to its ‘fat controller’ remote, so I hastily grab the old small pump and get it sucking, but we’ve lost some good wine. What’s the point of a brand new pump with a 10-metre lead and remote control if it doesn’t work? It’s Easter, no good ringing the supplier, so I open up the beautiful new waterproof remote control and there it is, quite simply, a loose wire on the start button. I tighten it, cursing the person whose job it was to do it at the factory.
Brian White arrives with the Axedale fruit, unfortunately with some vineyard staples included. Serge, Vikki and daughter have arrived and we’re having a great barbecue, awaiting the truck with the McKernans’ Coldstream fruit aboard, which arrives at dusk. I unload it (twelve bins) and suggest to the driver that he go over to the house and get something to eat and a strong coffee.
He returns to the winery: ‘You want another coffee, Wally?’
‘Nah, thanks.’
‘What time do you think you’ll get back home?’
‘Depends when you finish with the boxes.’
I can’t believe this. ‘Do you mean you want to take the bins back?’
‘Yeah, Rob could only borrow them overnight; didn’t he tell you?’
The reality dawns. We’ve got to crush twelve bins tonight, in the dark.
I go over the dry creek bed to the house and make the dreaded announcement. Everybody using their glasses or plates puts them down, including Serge, Vikki and Jesse. There is no discussion, they are all coming over to help. At least everything has been made ready for the morning so we can make an immediate start.
We don’t have lighting over the crusher so set up some temporary floodlights. I raise the first bin on the forklift to slide it into its frame but to my horror it doesn’t fit—these bins are about an inch wider than the standard ones! By manoeuvring the forks and pushing forward, I jam the first one in. I don’t like this as the whole structure of the bin tipper flexes and bends in protest, but I have no choice. Everybody is at their station, one each side of the slide, armed with rakes, one at the big pump control, another at the crusher to deal with the stalks, and two at the hose end to spread the must evenly and change over into a new vat when required.
More people than we normally require, but not everyone is familiar with the process and everyone wants to be part of it. So we progress, me sick at the prospect of breaking something. But somehow we battle through it, the job is finally done and the driver goes back to Coldstream with his oversized bins. I had enough labour to be able to fork a couple of bins into a vat for foot-stomping, so it’s pretty much where I wanted us to be, just earlier. As I go back to the house I reflect on the instinctive will of my friends to help. I suppose that’s mateship.
We finish our feast and the surprise wine of the night is a 1987 cabernet, a cool wet year when I picked early for I was going organic then and was afraid of powdery mildew. It is restrained, of course, but elegant and complete, almost in defiance of the stated 11.2 per cent alcohol on the label. Very Bordeaux-like, really.
Friday, 9 April
Shiraz into new barrels, normal winery duties—plunging, foot-stomping, taking readings, cleaning up. Bill’s back at work tomorrow so will have to spend some time working on the bin tipper mountings. I’ve loosened them where they were bolted into the concrete during last night’s pushing and shoving.
Saturday, 10 April
Just when you think the war’s over! Bruce Jones rings to say he’s picking 3 or more tons on Thursday—shoot, I’d clean forgotten that extra picking. He’s short of bins, of course; nearly all of them are here. Can’t have a truckie travel a 500-kilometre return journey with a few bins. Maybe the regular freight people can take them to Melbourne then transfer them to Narre Warren. When in trouble, handball to Sue!
‘Sue, do you think you could possibly . . . ?’
Robert McKernan arrives—he wants to work in the winery on his own grapes. Robert, Hugo, Shae Maree, the trainee back from wherever, Susie and me, Vanessa and Vicki—too many people, unfamiliar sounds coming from here and there.
Dionne’s temperature rising, also Esmé’s. We put the cooler on them. Then Gold, with the Axedale shiraz, starts blowing her stack—heaps of H2S, the smell almost overwhelming the perfume of fermenting wine. Susie is up on the catwalk feeding in DAP (diammonium phosphate) for nitrogen, also yeast nutrients. How can it still be producing H2S? There’s plenty of nitrogen in the ferment and we don’t want it to carry excess nitrogen into the barrel because of the possible consequences, but I don’t want to be adding copper later, either, to cure the problem. We connect the cooler to Gold to bring her down from 25 degrees Celsius. Get her down to 22 degrees. And then Silver’s cap starts to rise! It’s just too hot in the winery. Someone’s been listening to the radio—it’s the hottest April day for forty years or something. Then I discover the thermometers built into Silver and Gold are both reading 5 degrees too high according to our electronic probe and glass thermometer. How can the Italians make a tank with thermometers reading 5 degrees too high, and why? Is some Italian factory worker now choking with mirth on his tagliatelli?
Rob makes lunch as planned with the seafood he has brought up—prawns and oysters—no bread, no salad, just prawns and oysters. The afternoon becomes like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. People fumbling with hoses, splashes of wine everywhere, people saying ‘sorry, sorry’, and Susie and I trying to supervise. Too many people, too much wine, even my desk is wine-splashed and hemmed in with barrels and bins containing Fermenta bags. In the heat Robert speculates that he could have left the grapes on because the forecast rain has bypassed the Yarra Valley—too late now, and I’d made the call.
Foot-stomped pinots progressing well. Male visitors to the winery seem always to bring up that old observatio
n when they see people foot-stomping: ‘I thought you had to have virgins for that job, haw, haw.’ Hugo sticks his head in the winery and yells, ‘Tell Graeme that the virgins he ordered have arrived!’ I look out and there, walking towards us, framed by wattle and eucalypt and holding hands, are two of the sweetest, most innocent-looking twelve-year-old girls imaginable, obviously daughters of parents who are visiting Sue. Good one, Hugo!
Sunday, 11 April
Phil Adam from just down the road at Rheola has some shiraz for us—maybe it will suit the Two Mates, the wine I’m making in concert with Stefano for his restaurant. In any case we’ll keep it separate and see what it tastes like when it’s fermented. We crush it between pressings; it means changing the big pump over again, of course, and somebody dropped the inverter control box for the big pump and there’s something rattling inside it. Will open it up and have a look when I get time.
The Fermenta bags are getting warm but our cooling’s pretty well occupied with Silver and Gold. Thank God for the ‘gelati machine’! We could not have coped with the old cooler, still beavering away at the open fermenters. The ambient temperature is still summer-like; serious Indian Summer this year. Susie can’t get enough liquid out of one of them for a test sample—the one I put insufficient yeast into. Salacious jokes are made about them with their orifices and chimneys, and the one that’s slow to get going is now referred to as Sister Maria after an old joke I used to tell. All the pinots are going crazy. Me, too. Press flat-out. I’ll have to cancel my trip to Musk, too much happening. I ring Jamie Kinnear who has a tiny vineyard near there and is a good man with a hydrometer and he agrees to go to Musk and take some readings for me. We’re running out of storage space. Sue orders more Fermenta bags by express post.
Monday, 12 April
Press out McHardy shiraz from Beryl and Beau Foster’s shiraz from Claudia. Two foot-stomped green bins of pinot are put into new French oak hogsheads at 1 degree baumé. Narre Warren fruit arrives (nine bins). Sue must have organised it. I noticed that the bins were gone, Susie knew about it—secret women’s business! It looks like rain. Susie moves the bins into the winery but it doesn’t rain, so after lunch we move them back to the crusher and deal with them. Sister Maria decides to join the party and is gurgling and frothing away. I’ve ordered a tanker of water for the winery but it hasn’t arrived yet and we run out in the middle of cleaning up. Ring the water carter who offers to be out at 6 a.m. Gunga Din very busy this Indian summer.
Jamie rings and reports a brix reading of 18 degrees, but also of net damage—there are birds in there. To paraphrase the Japanese haiku poet Basho, ‘Oh what a game it is to set, Currawongs loose beneath the net.’ I’ll have to go to Musk.
The nets cover 10 acres like an aviary. At first we netted them in the conventional manner, covering a few rows and draping them down to the ground, where they were secured by pegs and wires. But the cunning old crows, with the benefit of an absentee landlord, found that they could cling to the nets and insert their beaks through them to attack the fruit. Thus it seemed necessary to cover the whole vineyard—a demanding task indeed, for it requires a length of net to be run covering a few rows and secured to the ground on the outside of the outer row, then another run has to be made over the next few rows, which means another trip 250 metres up the hill paying out the net from the roller attached to the tractor. Then the two nets have to be stitched together up the length of the row.
Last vintage we used conventional plastic net hooks for this job. These, however, proved inadequate to cope with the fierce southerlies roaring over the high point of the Great Dividing Range only about 300 metres from our most southerly and highest vines, so many of them broke or stretched open and let go, leaving great gaps in the netting. So this vintage saw Cameron, Jesse and I get a little production line going on the back verandah at Ruthven Street after school. I made up a small metal jig to allow us to turn short lengths of high-tensile 2.5-mm wire into compressed ‘S’ shapes and we made up 3000 of them to replace the plastic ones.
I’ve planted trees along the southern boundary of our property but it’ll be a few more years before they provide an adequate windbreak. Brother Greg suggested a wall of hay bales, which was a good idea but the cost seemed prohibitive—it would be like a piece of the Great Wall of China, in hay.
We get a lighter crop and less ripening on the upper half of the vineyard so the current positive thinking is to harvest that section at about 11 degrees baumé with huge natural acid for a sparkling, and the lower section at, say, 12.5 to 13 degrees baumé for the still chardonnay and pinot.
Originally I had planned a little cafe for Musk where we could serve an inexpensive tank-fermented chardonnay so I planted more of that than pinot. But it looks as if the cafe is not to be, so it’s been back to the drawing board. I’ve ordered more pinot rootlings to plant before next spring so that we’ll have more pinot to play with in 2011–12. More vines, more work, more trellis, more wires, and on a yet unproven site—no wonder I am completely uninterested in conventional gambling, there’s enough of it here!
So it appears that Bruno and I are going to Musk for a few days for some netting work. Bruno is invaluable for driving the birds out from the nets; although a retriever, he rounds up the birds like a kelpie rounding up sheep and drives them to the corner where I have opened the nets to allow them to escape. I’ll leave Susie in charge of the winery, and this diary, which she can’t wait to get her hands on. She’ll be disappointed to find it’s nearly all about winemaking! We have a great seafood dinner and I prepare to head off in the morning.
The Bhagwan goes to Musk by Susie McDonald
Tuesday, 13 April
Water arrives 6 a.m. Crush remaining shiraz and two bins of pinot into Beryl and Pamela respectively. Hugo poncing away being a catwalk model on our catwalk where he’s supposed to be pumping over Gold. We press Esmé, Dionne and Ina into cellar bags that I collect from post office after Sue tells me they’ve arrived there. Huge truck and trailer arrive with road gravel. Don’t know what to do but the driver does. He apparently did the last load four years ago. Bhagwan forgot to tell me about this. Fermenter bag ladies are pregnant, bloated and burping. Sister Maria has a burning ring of fermentation. H2S seems to be under control in Gold but there’s some in the pinot in Claudia so I add some DAP (see lab book for quantity). New barrel racks arrive and I get bogged on forklift. Graeme at Musk unfortunately. Phone him and miraculously get him on mobile. He tells me towing chain is on the tractor ready for Susie getting bogged on forklift.
Afternoon. The pipes are calling; chimney music. Now the winery is silent, free of ear-battering machines, black labradors and golden retrievers, the chimneys sound like an enormous Hopi Indian ear candle sucking wax out of a very hot nun’s ear. At 8 p.m. Sister Maria explodes! She must have got a blockage in her chimney and, when it let go, sprayed a good deal of wine about the place.
Wednesday, 14 April
Good fresh morning and the convent is quiet! Robert and Hugo depart today but first we will press out green bin shiraz and Claudia, with my friend Domenique assisting today. Perhaps Hugo and Robert will stay to unload and press out Silver, too. Yes, they do; Robert insists on staying till the end. Russell and Virginia appear with a bottle of champagne for Graeme and me. No Graeme, so more for Susie! I ask Hugo if he’d like to leave a note on the whiteboard; the whiteboard must have reminded him of the bookies’ chalkboards at racecourses because he’s written, ‘Claudia, Race 5, Rosehill, 3 to 1.’
Thursday, 15 April
Press Harriet, then Francine, sleep. The Bhagwan returns, having fixed some nets, shot some crows and liberated some pied currawongs.
Friday, 16 April
The chess game with barrels, tanks and cellar bags. Jill Burdett visits and helps set up for taking Angel 2003 off finings for bottling this Friday. McHardy shiraz from Bertha to barrels. Jill stays for lunch—garden fresh salad from the winery veggie garden (baby zucchini, delicious sweet tomatoes, purple bean
s, olive oil and lime), Polish sausage Graeme has brought back from Istra at Musk, and . . . Cruskits! Tonight it’s a big roast dinner at Newbridge Hotel for Dionne’s and my birthdays. Great bash, then back to change the cooler from Pamela into Claudia. We find message from Sue: corks for Friday’s bottling have arrived but we’re two boxes (5000 corks) short!
Saturday, 17 April
Press some Axedale shiraz into Bertha and three ‘out of space’ bags avec Jill B. who didn’t get one drop of grape juice on her all day! Picnic lunch on upside-down bin, courtesy of Cassie and Ross, now staying at Sue’s. Clean winery’s tiled floor, finally. Poor Bill the council worker raking driveway gravel with love. Angel off finings into Silver with sulphur addition. The other two boxes of corks have been located, one in Melbourne and the other in Brisbane; they were all part of the same consignment, from Adelaide! Lots of transferring—Graeme’s Blend off finings into Gold and Silver, having transferred Angel ’03 to T2. Using big pump for all this shuffling. Add sulphur and tartaric. Graeme’s Blend into T1, leaving Gold and Silver free again so Silver can take the Reserve Shiraz from Alisa and three hogsheads, all on finings. Over to Silver to await bottling on Friday/Saturday. All in all, 28,000 litres of ’03 wine pumped and ready for bottling.
Also rack the Axedale ’04 shiraz that had H2S, not wanting to leave it in barrel. Suspend a little bit of copper wire in it to make sure it’s clean and then it’s into Gold while she’s empty. Back to clean barrels. Press out Pamela into Alisa and bucket Zonnebeke cabernet out of Marilyn into Esmé to create room by clearing out all the now unnecessary vats. So bye-bye Anna, Ina, Marylin, Olivia and Pamela. Enjoy your ten-month holiday under the peppercorn tree! Now we can work on storing new wine in barrel in some order. For lunch, we have hock and Kaiserfleisch soup made last night—three-quarters in pot, one-quarter on ute floor.