Dan's Harvest Updates

Dirt Music

All Saints and St Leonards are based around the idea that we grow our own grapes. We bend this rule sometimes in order to meet demand if our own vineyards are not going to yield enough. In the last few days I have been driving around the local area looking at different Shiraz vineyards with fruit for sale. One of the large household-name wine conglomerates has dramatically reduced its take from North East Victoria, and as a result there is some excellent Shiraz looking for a home this year. As I have visited vineyards I have been fascinated by the different soils in the Rutherglen region.

Bordeaux soils have been created by the Garonne, Gironde and Dordogne and their relationship with underlying strata. Recent ice ages have also played a defining role in what lies beneath the serried rows of vines. The same is true in Rutherglen. Our soils are a product of local geology and dramatic climatic changes in the last ice age and stretching back to almost unfathomable depths of geological time. We are nestled between the foothills of Australia's Great Dividing Range, and our grandest river, the Murray. We are little more than an hour to the ski fields and only minutes from the river.

We have lovely rose pink soils on the two estates. Deep sandy loams predominate, with varying proportions of sand and clays across the two vineyards. Elsewhere the soils can be significantly different. We shall probably be taking some Shiraz from the following soil types

'Black Dog Loam' which has a deeper red colour and higher clay content. Wines from this vineyard tend to be richer and darker than ours, but without as much elegance or aromatics.

‘Buckshot Clay Loam' is paler, more yellowish and more friable, with characteristic iron nodules. These blocks grow some lovely fruit, still not as aromatic as ours but with great balance.

These two soil types, along with the sandy loams that we have, are a result of the action of the Murray river, in particular when it was a massive braided system at the end of the last ice age. The spring melts would have caused great floods that shaped the land through alternately scouring and depositing huge quantities of alluvial material.

Here and there throughout the region is something very different. The deep bedrock is exposed, which is made up of Ordovician metasediments. These are compressed sea-bed silts deposited roughly 450 million years ago. I'm told there are few fossils in this particular series, but it was a time when trilobites and nautiloids were abundant. I've always wanted a trilobite fossil, and keep a wishful eye out whenever I kick over a rock. Our oldest block, the Mid-Flat Shiraz, planted in 1920, is on this pale grey soil and I think produces the most delicate and lifted of our fruit.

I have a plan this year (strictly between you and me of course, don't tell the boss) to make a small batch from each of the soil types. I'll do it exactly the same way for each of them, so all we'll get are the differences in dirt.

See Also: Ask Dan