WINE NOTES:
Spare a thought for those hard-working souls who battle the weather gods to deliver your favourite drop.
fingers crossed for 2020’s harvest
Vineyards are now in the thick of harvest, bustling with people and machines, with viticulturists keeping a wary eye out for rain, and poor old winemakers propping their eyelids open through the round-the-clock work of getting grapes safely into the winery.
Months of hard work culminate in a few weeks’ opportunity to pick what we hope are perfectly healthy and perfectly ripened grapes, assuming weather, birds, pests and diseases have all been successfully kept at bay. The latter few challenges can usually be managed, but inclement weather is out of everyone’s control, as winemakers found in 2017 and 2018 when tropical cyclones came whirling through the harvest months.
Luckily, 2020 is shaping up to be an easier year, dry with ample sunshine and warmth, maintaining that all-important balance between sugar, acids and flavour compounds (known as phenolics). You might assume in a relatively cool climate such as New Zealand’s that a very warm year is welcome, but when it’s too hot, acidity can drop quickly and sugars accumulate faster than phenolics, resulting in flabby, overly alcoholic wines with not enough flavour depth.
Typically, our hot days are tempered by cool nights, but climate change means those cool nights are no longer guaranteed. Rain now arrives at different times and with greater (or lesser) intensity and “typical” harvests seem less common. As we are a long, thin country, with mountainous terrain, and in the middle of an ocean, our wine regions are very diverse viticulturally speaking. Regions may only be separated by a few hundred kilometres but will experience very different conditions, which in turn affect the varieties grown and the character of the wines. Thankfully, viticulturists and winemakers are clever, adapting to the challenges the weather gods throw at them, and continue to deliver us lucky wine-drinkers the delicious fruits of their labours.