Author Archive
Salami making
A few local wine makers and foodie friends got together on the weekend to try their hand at Salami making.Thanks to our expert Italian friend Tony and Graham we managed to put together 3 different styles .Tasting will be held in a month or so ,and then hopefully some cheese making too.
Graham Kerr our host , local winemaker and balloonist , has entered some of his salamis in the small goods smackdown so we all have our fingers crossed for his success .
Wine Industry Smallgoods Smackdown
Born from a love of all things dead animal, the Wine Industry Smallgoods Smackdown is a smallgoods challenge for winemakers who play with meat. The competition – to decide who has the best tasting smallgoods. Wine bon vivants Mike Bennie and Dave Brookes are co-founders and co-Chair of Judges for this most prestigious of competitions. All winemakers who cure, cook, dehydrate, spice, pummel, puree, hang or smoke are eligible to enter their meat goods. Follow the Wine Industry Smallgoods Smackdown on Twitter at #WISS. Get in touch via twitter @mikerism101 and @vino_freakism for more details, or leave a comment on this site… FLASH – Judgement day is 02SEP11 to be held at Artisans of the Barossa cellar door – all entries to be submitted the week before!
You have to say for a small country town ,there is a lot going on here!!
Sat 22nd October canowindra@home Twilight Market, to be held in Memorial Park 4:30 to 7:30 pm. The best of the region’s food, wine and music for the family and friends.
Monday 16th April 2012, 4th 100 Mile Dinner in Canowindra’s main street 6pm.Food ,Wine and Music for the Central Ranges( Canowindra, Orange ,Mudgee, Bathurst ,Cowra) preparde by some of he regions geatest chefs and winemakers.
Winter is all but over.We have had our share of cold weather, but not quite what we would like in the rainfall department,we are hard to please!!
The Vineyard and Olive Grove ,70 ha now have full Biodynamic certification so feeling quite a sense of achievement. The rest of the farm,330 ha, should follow next year.
The wines are slowly maturing , they’ll spend another 12 months in oak. We have 2 blends , a cab sav/cab franc/petit verdot and a grenache/mourvedre , so looking forward see how they come up.
The olive oil is resting to drop solids to the bottom of the tanks, ready for bottling in the spring.
olive harvest for pickling the hard way
Olive harvest the easy way for oil
Antoine and Niels pruning
Best of all PRUNING is over!.We have had the help of several backpackers/woofers that really got things done.They were great once they were in the vineyard ,getting them out of bed before midday was a bit of a challenge!
The boys van blew up!!
We have also pulled out 3ha of chardonnay, don’t worry we still have 4ha left, so the chardonnay will continue.We are exploring what to replace it with .
As part of the whole farm plan we have bought some Dorper sheep, they are a sheep bred for meat and shed their wool ,so no need to shear and also not as likely to get fly strike etc, so for organic farmers they have an advantage.They have been in the vineyard for winter eating the weeds and fertilising, dual purpose.They have also been lambing so there are cute lambs in abundance as they have a lot of twins and triplets!!We be sending the sheep around the farm following the cattle as they’ll eat species of vegetation the cattle won’t, so that helps with balance in the pasture.
the array of solar panels
happy mum with triplets
Another important addition to the farm has been a 10kw solar array, consisting of 168 ground mounted solar panels,producing more power than we will ever use .
August has seen the release of 2 NEW WINES, a Sauvignon Blanc 2011, made from grapes sourced in the Orange area , this is a fresh clean wine with a hint of gooseberry,great drinking in the warmer months ahead. Also a Cabernet Merlot blended red wine, which has a rich broad palate and long finish with sweet berry flavours. The Cervantes, methode champenoise, pinot noir has developed beautifully,drinking better at every tasting! Stocks are getting down on that .
The girls are all getting on with their varied lives.Nadja, my winemaking daughter is having a great experience in California, working at Mary Edwards Winery in the Russian River area.She doesn’t seem to have any plans to come home in the near future but when she does she’ll have gained a wealth of experience .Isabella is working in Canberra using her Anthropology degree with the government.Veronica is in her 3rd year of an athletics scholorship in Los Angeles at University, she is enjoying being able to see Nadja occasionally, and Gabrielle has really found her niche in the Fine Arts -Ceramics department at ANU in Canberra.
After what has been the wettest and coolest summer for many years, harvest is approaching in a much more casual fashion than in recent memory.It’s been a long steady growing and ripening season, which will deliver grapes that haven’t been stressed and able to mature without loosing too much acid (which happens when they ripen too quickly in very dry and hot conditions).So we are looking at fantastic quality.The season is more like I remember, when we were feeling lucky to get chardonnay picked before the end of February, as we would get a payment a month earlier for contracted grapes.
The season has not been without its setbacks,with different mildews sneaking about, so a lot of vigilance needed.The biodynamic regime seems to have helped strengthen the vines to be able to resist too much disease..No need for watering so our big irrigation dam has had a chance to recharge , so much so that the pump did end up submerged one night.
So it’s clean up time at the winery.We are getting low on stocks ,so it will be good to have some new wines in the barrels.
We have a couple of great events coming up in association with Orange Food Week8-17 April download the program at www.orangefoodweek.com.au.
Here in Canowindra we host “The 100 Mile Dinner” ,where we invite chefs and winemakers from Orange, Mudgee, Bathurst, Cowra and Canowindra to share their produce with us at a meal for 300 in the main(dog leg) street .It’s a fun night with great music for dancing during and after the meal. Tickets sell out quickly ,you can order them from the Food website .
I’ll be holding free tours of the vineyard,olive grove and winery and explaining our organic operation at 11am or 2pm most days accompanied with a wine tasting. Please book first
The canowindra@home group are also holding Night Markets at the Balloon Glow on Sat 9th April 5-8pm at the Tom Clyburn oval in Canowindra,where once again the local producers will be offering tastings and take away of their own products.Small portion meals will be available to enjoy while you taste the best of the local wines.
It will be a busy couple of weeks for Canowindra as the town is hosting the National Balloon Championships from8th-17th April, so we’ll have at least an extra 200 people in town competing or crewing plus spectators .It’s always a magnificent spectacle to see the balloons blowing up and taking off on mass early in the morning and mid afternoon. There will be up to 40 balloons competing .
All this is around the Easter holiday break so it’s a great chance to get away and have some fun!!
What a SPRING we have had,RAIN ,RAIN and more RAIN! It has also been much cooler than what we would normally expect.
So, quite a challenging season in the vineyard, trying to prevent fungal disease outbreaks. The vines are growing like triffids for the first time in years,that’s good to see.However yields will be down as a result of last years extremely dry spring, as that is when the fruit buds for the following year develop, and our vines were so stressed that didn’t happen.
We have made the big decision to cut out 2ha of chardonnay grapes ,a very sad but realistic thing to do.We still have more than enough for our own requirements, chardonnay grapes are not the flavour of the month, so not easy to sell!! We haven’t decide what to grow in their place, any suggestions?
There’s plenty of work in the vineyard as we are retraining vines that have suffered over the years of drought.We’ve had more WOOFERS (workers on organic farms) over the past couple of months, so they have been a great help in the vineyard with so much to do. They all seem to enjoy their stay in Canowindra, they are made very welcome and remark the contrast to time spent in larger towns and cities.We do live in a great place!!
We have spent this morning moving our pump to higher ground as we await a further deluge in the next few days ,and luckily have had enough dry time to get another anti fungal spray on the vines.
Being organic growers we are limited with what we can use to sulphur and copper,which do the job as long as you can get it on at the right time,that’s the challenge.We have also put out a few more biodynamic preparations on the vineyard, olives and a couple of paddocks, and are planning a large compost heap.
The OLIVE trees have had a great time of it ,loving the rain .Looks like we should get a reasonable crop this year, as we don’t have a lot of oil left that’s good news.
Around the farm the nut trees are enjoying the season with pistachio and almond trees laden .If we can avoid hail storms we will have a bounty of apricots, nectarines , peaches and mulberries in the next month.Also the artichoke patch has gone crazy.Any great recipes gratefully accepted!
The winery is sitting quietly waiting for the next vintage,there is some bottling to do,as we are running low on a lot of lines now.There has been a lot of the methode champanoise Pinot going out the door for Christmas celebrations,it has really developed into a great wine.
I’m looking forward to the Christmas and New Year as I’ll have all the family at home at once.Gabrielle returns first, from travels on the north coast followed by Nadja who has finished her wine science and viticulture degree ,but for a change has spent the last 6 weeks volunteering in an AIDS orphanage in Cambodia. Isabella will be home form work in Canberra, Olie(our Rwandan family member) home from his holiday research job, and Veronica will finally be home briefly from her running and studies in the USA, she hasn’t been home for a year!
I wish you a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year
Winter is behind us and to date we have had almost double the rainfall for all of last year. Things have changed!! The countryside is a picture with brilliant yellow canola in full flower and vibrant green wheat fields growing while you watch them. The dams are full for the first time in 12 years! For us it means the soil profile is full of beautiful fresh water , so now we are awaiting the first green buds to start emerging on the bare vines. We don’t want any more frosts , as they burn the new shoots.
The last 3 months have been spent PRUNING (ahh my aching wrist!) and doing some serious reworking of the vines , this will mean a much reduced crop for next vintage, it should also mean improved quality. It takes that long for 3 of us to prune 30,000 vines. We did get some help from local friends and visitors, spending their Sundays as the pruning team, plenty of chat time and good company for the late lunches that followed. Hopefully they will come back to help pick the vines they pruned then make wine from those grapes. They’ll be drinking their own wine before they know it.
The lawn mowers have been in the vineyard for the winter, ie sheep , and they have done a great job on the weeds and fertilised while they were at it.
We are very proud that the whole farm (400ha) is now in conversion to Organic and Biodynamic agriculture, and we’ve installed flowforms for stirring the biodynamic products sprayed around the farm, a specialised spray rig has also been constructed for the job.
We are getting organised to set up a large compost heap, 2 tons of cow manure ,egg shells I’ve been saving for a year, 2 tons of straw ,1 ton of rock dust, newspapers from the last 6 months, you should be getting the idea of size now!!It should be ready to spread out in the vineyard in 6 months.
The more I think about it the greater the realisation of the responsibility that comes with custodianship of land. We have always tried to choose eco (ecological and economic) solutions to our farming practice, this move to organics is another step up .
The winery will be open most weekends now, but it would be prudent to phone and check first.