April has provided a reasonably smooth harvest with grapes arriving sporadically and in great condition. I enjoyed hand harvesting some of our Pania Chardonnay with Hayden Lay (Vineyard Manager Giants Site) on one of our Havelock North Hawkes Bay sites and got out to our Kidnappers Hawkes Bay site to see a larger crew of about 60 hand harvest there too. The fruit is harvested at just over 23 brix and tastes sweet and delicious with notable differences from the individual sites. This highlights one of the unique points of Wild Rock Wine – it is regional specific wine taken from our individual sites in each of our premium New Zealand regions representing the very best of the area.
Our Pania Chardonnay has gone through the first wild fermentation, and has been barrelled up, and then come spring it will warm up and go through the secondary fermentation (Malolatic Fermentation). The Merlot for our Gravel Pit Red has also come in and almost all has completed the fermentation process as well. The quality is right up there so we are looking at another awesome vintage – so far.
The Angels Dust Syrah grapes have just started to roll in from our Gimblett Gravels vineyard. I was sorting through these grapes yesterday and they taste divine and look great too. It was difficult to find many bunches to discard as they were all looking so good. These were de-stemmed and placed into large cuves for fermentation. The Malbec will begin to be harvested later in the week.
Information on Gimblett Gravels
Our Gimblett Gravels Vineyard is widely regarded amongst the very best vineyards for Bordeaux Reds and Syrah in New Zealand. Its unique location creates the warmest vineyard area in the country, where other climatic factors such as sunshine hours, humidity and rainfall are also ideal. The stony soils further warm the entire environment of the vine and create excellent soil conditions for making ultra premium red wines from these varieties. The stylistic characters of red wines from the vineyard are richness, ripeness and elegance with a distinctive fine dusty tannin finish we call Gimblett Dust – a.k.a. Angels Dust.
Xterra Rotorua
I had a great time riding the Xterra 29km Mountain Bike race held in Rototua 10th April. Xterra is New Zealand’s largest multi discipline race with various choices of races available for most levels. It is a well organised event which has a real friendly feel about it and is set in Whakarewarewa, NZ’s best mountain biking area, and around the Blue Lake which is absolutely stunning. I placed 16th out of 140 overall and 10th for my age group in a time of 1hr 38min.
Congratulations Simon Matthews of Auckland!
Simon won the mixed case of award winning Wild Rock Wine after being randomly selected from all of the participants who entered the on-line Label Survey.
Thanks again to all the wonderful people who participated in the survey.
Cheers
The Wild Rock Guy
