Settling in back home.

Sorry I haven't posted for such a long time. I am now well and truly back to earth at home. The vineyard, as you can see from my photo of some Chardonnay, is growing very rapidly, we now have inflorescence's separated and well defined. The winter rainfall so far has been close to average however, it has been coming in relatively small regular showers. This means that everything looks nice and green, however subsoil moisture's are not very high and there has been very little run off for people who rely on dams for irrigation. Even though I don't want to spend a lot of time out spraying my vineyard - I am hoping for a very wet spring.

On a more positive note, I was talking to Louisa Rose (chief winemaker for Yalumba) yesterday, about the last vintage from here in the Barossa. She said that '2008 will produce some of the best wine to come out of this region in a long time'. This echos what I said some time ago on this blog about the near perfect ripening conditions we had this year. So keep an eye out for the 2008 vintage wines that will begin to hit the market soon from the Barossa, both whites and (some wait still) reds. Even varieties like Grenache that was mostly picked during or after the heatwave have produced incredible wines.
At home here the weather has been fine and mild with a couple of quite windy, drying days last week. The official weather station has been down for nearly a week (thanks to vandals), so I do not have rainfall figures - but there has been very little (less than 0.5mm). We did record our warmest September day in more than 10 years last Saturday (27th) of 31.7C (89F).