It’s well and truly the new financial year and I’m long overdue a blog post, so here we go. Joch has gone mad with new signage, using local Willunga slate as his medium. We have finally replaced the old Tyrrell’s winery sign on Gaffney Road with our own shingle. Hopefully this will ensure trucks only use this entrance and not the cellar door one (overhanging trees…) but anything is possible. Looks good, right?
Joch has also marked out our Bradens block which is on the main drag from McLaren Vale to Willunga. You can see (despite the amateur iPhone shot) the wonderful cover crop behind it. There are fava beans (remember Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs) and triticale which is a hybrid of wheat and rye. They’ve both shot up following the good August rains we’ve had. We get Shiraz from Braden’s which makes up the single vineyard Shiraz as well as the Red Frontignac for you Moscato-heads.
And finally in the slate series, we have the the new cellar door sign at the end of the drive way. Well done Joch! The sky looks pretty ominous behind it – we really did have a few great days of rain.
We got some great points from James Halliday in his recently released 2016 Wine Companion. Well done team!
Joch has been over to Perth with our distributors there, Grape and Grain and did some work on the road helping to sell both the Bosworth and Spring Seed Wines. Clair and Matt Holden who run the show over there are great fun…as you can see from the photos from Clair’s 40th. Clair ‘Dolly Parton’ Chatel-Holden and Matt ‘Walter White’ Holden from the HBO show ‘Breaking Bad’ certainly know how party….The theme was American, given that the knees up was on the 4th of July.
July and August are serious pruning months and here you can see Harley pruning the Hill Shiraz with his new electric secateurs. Harley is technically a fisherman but becomes a land lubber during the winter months and has pruned this block for the last few years. Thanks Harley!
I received a note from a cellar door customer who came and visited us late last year. She returned home to the east coast of the US via the Queen Mary from the UK and sent me an email with this photo attached. Look what’s being served at the Captain’s Table! If like me you are scrabbling for your +1 reading glasses, I can tell you it is none other than our Puritan Shiraz. If I read between the lines correctly, Hilary and her husband drank the ship dry of it. Great work Hilary. I made the bit up about the Captain’s table, I think it was just available in one of the restaurants.
We have news of Ian Adam; doyen of winery and vineyards, cellar door darling and resident wit is off to do his first northern hemisphere vintage. Ian spent last vintage here at Bosworth learning Francais from another vintage crew member, Aurelien who hails from the Loire Valley. Et voila! Ian heads to France at the end of August to work in a winery in the Anjou region of the Loire. He will be staying with Aurelien’s parents, too! They are in for a treat, Ian is a super chef. Bon voyage, Ian and see you back here for vintage 2016. I’d like to take this opportunity to wheel out one of my favourite shots of Ian cooling off on a hot day underneath his avocado trees. Timeless shot.
If you’ve got enough steam left after reading all that, take the time to read an article by wine commentator Philip White (he wrote the wine column for years in the Advertiser) about our 20 year anniversary of being organic. You can find it here on In Daily.
Cheers from all of us!