1995 a year for growers

Anyone who visited a Tasmanian vineyard this time last year will remember all too clearly the wringing of hands and the gnashing of teeth that accompanied local grower assessments of vintage 1994. For many producers, only the last minute arrival of an Indian summer ensuring excellent fruit quality averted a potential disaster. 

As it was, crop sizes were dismal, with winery volumes down by as much as half in some places.

What a difference a year can make.

With the last pickings of season 1994-95 completed just six weeks ago, most vineyards this year have enjoyed the luxury of abundant crops of high quality grapes. Many producers are hailing the vintage as a roaring success.

Nowhere is that more apparent than at the home site of Tasmania's largest wine producer, Pipers Brook Vineyard. Having picked around 640 tonnes of top quality fruit from its four separate vineyards (totalling 62 ha), company managing director and industry pioneer Dr Andrew Pirie already suspects this vintage will become one of the great ones.

Certainly, it's the biggest since he planted his company's first vines back in 1974.

Unused to handling such a large volume of fruit, Pirie found himself presented with a set of unique problems this year. Where to find space for all of these new wines? How to pay for their processing?

Taking to heart Oscar Wilde's principle that nothing succeeds like excess, he hit upon a simple solution - selling off a portion of early-picked fruit, and using the cash acquired to pay for subsequent winemaking and the hire of temporary storage facilities.

"Our yield forecasts were spot-on this year," Pirie says.

"We were able to forward-sell a bit of Pinot Noir to some of the mainland sparklers. I think it's emerging as a very valuable bit of raw material, not only for us, but for the people who buy it."

Retaining the choicest fruit for its own labels, Pipers Brook Vineyard this year prepared a base wine for Dr Pirie's pet-project, an estate labelled, bottle-fermented sparkling wine. It's due for release sometime in 1998.

Grapes from the 1995 vintage will constitute 85 per cent of a Pinot Noir/Chardonnay blend.

"The fact that we're setting aside some of our most expensive blocks to cultivate fruit for sparkling wine - some of the steep hillside blocks at Ninth Island - indicates just how seriously we're taking it. We're actually using some of our best fruit for sparkling wine,' Pirie notes.

Lovers of Pipers Brook Vineyard Chardonnay and Pinot Noir table wines need not fear their favourites have been down-graded, however. On the contrary, some excellent young '95s to be released under early-drinking Ninth Island labels range reflect the company's wealth of top-class material.

Estate-packaged wines will maintain their consistent, highly-regarded standards, though there will be no Summit Chardonnay this year.

"The rain at the end of vintage got us, and botrytis eventually set in," Pirie adds.

On the horizon, the four incongruous-looking storage vessels currently moored like submarines outside the Pipers Brook winery will be replaced by something much more substantial.

"We're putting in more volume storage for next vintage," Pirie explains.

"We've got a $2m building program before the council at the moment. That will see the winery expand out the back with underground sparkling and barrel stores, and a big new bottling room on top. It's quite an expansion."

First published 20 July 1995: The Advocate