WINE NOTES

It’s harvest time in the vineyards - a little earlier than usual thanks to our hot summer. So how will that affect the vintage?

This time of year, vineyards are a hive of activity, overrun with hand-pickers and machine harvesters, viticulturists anxiously scanning weather patterns (these days via laptops, not the clouds!) and winemakers bracing themselves for the coming weeks of round-the-clock work.

All are focused on the precise window of opportunity for gathering up the sunripened grapes that represent another year’s work by the vines, bringing them into the winery to start the alchemy-like transformation from simple grape juice to golden and ruby-hued wines.

This year’s harvest is an early one, with grapes ripening around a fortnight earlier than usual, courtesy of the hot November to January period. Grapes are typically harvested from February through to May, depending on region, variety and style, so the final assessment of 2018’s overall quality and character is yet to be settled, although most producers seem to think it’ll be good, if atypical.

You might assume a very warm year is a good thing (generally, winemakers do prefer them to ones with not enough sunshine and heat), but the trick to making great wine is to harvest grapes with just the right balance of sugar, acids and flavour compounds (known as phenolics). In hot years, acid can drop too fast and sugars accumulate faster than phenolics, resulting in flabby wines with too much alcohol and not enough flavour and depth. This is not usually a problem in a cool-climate viticulture country such as New Zealand, as hot days are tempered by cool nights; however, as anyone who sweltered through this year’s summer knows, the nights were anything but! The accompanying humidity and at times biblical rain events also put extra strain on a producer’s nerves. Yet all that said, 2017 delivered two tropical cyclones smack bang in the harvest period – something that would be on very few winemakers’ wish lists – and there are many delicious wines from that year. Come what may for vintage 2018, our wineries are up to the task!