Monthly Report - November 2024 to January 2025
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Prep Done…
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The past three months is similar to the kneading of a loaf when baking bread. It is the hard yards, the bit that takes up all your time before you have a few hours of letting it rise before being punched down and thrown into the oven – with the outcome, delicious carbohydrates. I have sat down and started this report a few times, but each day seems to get away from me with odd jobs continually breaking the flow and this does stop all progress pretty quickly.
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November and December decide the volume of grapes that you could expect for the vintage, it contains the point of flowering and the weight of the growth of the vines to support the bunches that swell from a tiny “droplet” through to their “small marble” size. The grapes you see in the supermarket have very little in common with wine grapes – they are positively huge by comparison – and the distance between them in flavour is night and day. Wine grapes are seedy, small with thick skins that begin to break down at the point of picking, generally come in small bunches and taste oh soooo sweet. The less “fine” the grape, the larger the bunch size generally – our Marsanne for example has bunches 3-4 times larger than the Chardonnay, and if you look up generic grapes such as Ugni Blanc and Colombard for example, each individual bunch can weigh up to 1-2kg each which are 3-4 times larger again!
January becomes the month when the vines start moving from green marbles to softer marbles, and often variably coloured as we go through the transformation called veraison. You know you cannot do anything more in the vines from a hands-on perspective as the last mildew spray has been put out, the vines are wire lifted into their last position and the thinning and basal cleaning has been completed. It is a month which finishes the grunt work, and now the blue, blue sky just looks down and you hope for temperatures to stay in moderation.
The job list during these past months is both long and varied:
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Wires are lifted into shape to ensure the grape exposure to sunlight and wind is assured (though admittedly I have been cautious with making the rows too “tight” as any very hot day can cause sunburn to the grapes and that causes a dramatic loss of tonnage and makes me cry like a baby)
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Irrigation lines are checked and repaired as required (not for use, but more for insurance)
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Fences are mended
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Nets are checked
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Wines are bottled
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…and perhaps most importantly the base of the vines are cleaned of wayward shoots and the top of the vines thinned of excess growth and bunches
The cleaning of bases of the vines and thinning the growth is a slow job with Marjory helping out for the 2-3 weeks of working away each morning before it gets too hot. The way it works generally is that Marjory works ahead, and I clean up the larger vines she leaves for me as well as checking the top of the vine, pulling out what is not required. This for me is awesome – makes it much faster than me alone by more than double, and I get some company to complain about the flies with. Until. Marjory puts down her hand to start cleaning the growth near the ground and as she does so she looks straight into the eyes of a snake peacefully wrapped around the base of the vine in the long grass. It moved away at a similar rate to Marjory and then a few words were uttered in the excitement of the moment. I was totally cool of course knowing there was a poisonous snake in a 3m vicinity, somewhere hidden in the undergrowth, totally cool, as all born and bred New Zealanders are known for their love of snakes as having never ever met them in country.
The snake slid off. Marjory felt vindicated when I saw the long tail sliding north away from us (somehow claiming I did not believe her in the moment – I think I said “Are you sure?” which is tantamount to saying she “looks large in those clothes”). We took a day off and finished the last 6 rows a little tentatively, but it is done, and the vines are now just growing what needs to be grown and no snakes were hurt in achieving this aim, thus all is right in the world.
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The culprit – a Western Brown Snake
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Bottled Joy…
It has come to pass, the final Chardonnay influenced by our old mate Clive Otto has been hand bottled by us and put into wine storage. The term influenced is one which comes into play in the sense that Clive and the team have a method in use in which all the Chardonnays made at Fraser Gallop Estate were treated in a very similar way, and the only real difference between the wines are the grapes and where they came from. But Chardonnay is a winemaker’s grape for a reason, and in 2024 Ellin, our new head wine maker, did us a solid by finding a way to press off our small yield (sunburn dropped tonnes by >30%) in the bag press and this gave us a larger volume of this delicious nectar.
We have been wishing for a bigger yield with these vines for a while now. Every year seems to have something that brings it down with the super-hot vintage of 2024 causing all sorts of losses in this block. So, to see the wine filling bottles at Maison “Yeah Wines” is a great feeling. Having a sneaky sip shows how this variety is becoming better with age on the grafts – much broader sweeps of flavour are now on the nose and palate, with stone fruit being more of a combination rather than one single descriptor. Acid balance is on the money, ensuring it is refreshing ahead of “fat”, and the barrel fermented oak framing is more of a feel than any distinctive aroma or taste.
But for the record, the Otto affect was not quite over. Young Amelia Otto dropped in on a very very hot day to help us bottle both this 2024 Chardonnay and the 2023 Shiraz, manning the bottle capper with great aplomb and dealing with a Krampus in myself who tried to ensure the labels were on straight. Look out for a March/April release for the 2024 Chardonnay as we are getting down to fumes with the 2023 vintage. I could not be more happy with how our Chardonnay is going, just wish we could have a vintage that all stars align allowing better yields from our vines to make even more of this lovely wine.
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Amelia and I claiming the completion of the Chardonnay bottling alone…​
Bottled Future Classics…
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It is not often that you do something that makes sense to you, but very hard to let it make sense to everyone else. Our “peak” wine is the Deux Écus, our blend of Merlot and Cabernet Franc that is selected from the total barrels made from any one vintage – only two have been made, one in 2018 and one in 2022. The 2023 vintage was in many ways the equivalent in quality to the 2022, and with the same growing conditions of being dry grown and treated totally organically in the vineyard (sprays only consisted of sulphur and copper, no herbicides or other treatments), a selection of new barrels were purchased in, and we had good volumes to choose from - we had every opportunity to compile another of these superb wines.
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But for one thing.
The quality of the blended singular Reserve wines of Merlot and Cabernet Franc was exceptional. Really exceptional. The Merlot followed a similar pattern to the 2022 vintage, with deep rich fresh plums, coating fine tannins, density on the palate and great length – a fantastic rendition. But the Cabernet Franc stole the show (however slightly) – the final selection of 100% new oak barrels was a revelation, with aromatics ramped up to 11, WEIGHT on the palate and the most delicious of length. To have altered either wine would have been a loss, regardless that it was moving up a scale in our wine’s pecking order. I did try to see if the remaining barrels could conjure a Deux Écus but that was not to be – and the Allouran which was blended was simply whole, and it needed to be left to form another plank in this wine’s legacy.
In the last week of January, we bottled off the three 2023 Merlot and Cabernet Franc wines. All went well and they are now sitting in our cool store storage facility resting after their transfer from barrel to bottle. These wines will be released to the market in about 3-4 months once they settle and the weather cools for delivery. But as with previous years we will offer the two 2023 Reserve wines in an “En Primeur” in the coming weeks.
The reason for this is that our mailing list can secure these wines at lower cost, we can cover more easily the cost of vintage, and that we can then gauge what we will offer to retail post the campaign. I doubt I have been more confident in the quality of any wines I have produced than these two Reserves and as such it is exciting to see how everyone will respond to the wines as they are eventually released – personally I think they could match the best of either varietal produced in this country.
Big statement. But yes they are that good.
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2023 Reserve Wines
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Saint-Emilion (Part 2)…
Strap in comrades, we are about to discuss the geology of Saint-Emilion. But this topic will come with baggage, my baggage – we have a circuitous route in front of us which will go global and go local (randomly). So, settle in with your favourite crystal and a glass of Allouran next to your chair and take in what will be some form of an “exit interview” for this knowledge “store” of mine.
Being a geologist means seeing the world with a different pair of glasses. The glasses are not any better or wiser than anyone else’s but they do make my worldview unique to most. Geology as a science is one that has hundreds of offshoots with much less clarity as seen in Physics, Chemistry and even Biology with their clear rules and definitions – geology is that distracted child that annoys all these “science” adults and uses their shared knowledge to try to understand what they are looking at whenever they kick a rock or see a mountain.
Within the field of geology, you have many that stick to the theoretical in universities and government departments – they tend to be the “odd” ones who obsess over detail and order. The geologists that move into the world of mining and exploration like me (and Tim), are ones that are a huge “mix”, as their personalities determine their interests – some become fixated with their computer screens, some the loading of trucks and definition of ore, some the numbers of meters drilled and the contracts of exploration and management, and others find gratification in the “hunt”. But what they all should have is an appreciation of deep time and the physical processes that surround them – though I must admit many lose this underpinning base as they are wrapped in the patina of company life and processes.
My interest in my field of study has never waned. It is to me still the most interesting topic that I will ever touch upon – it underpins my worldview in a strange and delicate way.
To this end, every landscape I look at, I consciously and subconsciously imagine how it was sculpted, every rocky outcrop I try to place it in the differing setting in which it formed (be it tens of kilometres underground, to sitting in a lake or shallow ocean, to being preserved along a dune or beach), and a differing time. From my window in the vineyard, I see a series of rolling hills. I feel the Maragret River behind me meandering along etching out each winter the soft sediments of the Cretaceous sands and clays laid down during the time of the dinosaurs. I can place the coal seam 100m beneath the house formed during the Permian when plants filled the planet that contained but one single continent – Pangea. I see the subtle shifts in the landscape showing where the very recent deeply weathered laterites formed and were then slowly eaten back by rainfall cutting through and into its underbelly of soft sediments – leaving our spoonful of gravelly laterite in which our Merlot and Cabernet Franc vines thrive. Faults lie out to the west of me lifting the ancient Pre-Cambrian granites and granitic gneisses and forming the underpinning geology from Wilyabrup down to Karridale. I see all this quite clearly in my mind’s eye – as clearly as I see the huge gaps in the wheel of time with the world’s plates spreading and coalescing in a form of a dance with the dot of Margaret River lifting and sinking with every passing epoch.
My glasses are different.
Arriving in Bordeaux in 2010 was almost a “geological overload” for me. I had spent a large chunk of time in 1999-2000 reviewing the geology and climate of the region in our finding of the vineyard which we bought and developed from 2001, and though it was a decade on, it was as if I was coming “home” to a degree. The drive from the airport along the Garonne River, to the rolling hills of the area known as Entre-deux-Mers, crossing the Dordogne River and the large gravel flats, to spotting the town of Saint-Emilion perched upon a limestone bluff – it felt very déjà vu. The glory which is Bordeaux is subtly held within those sediment piles brought down by those rivers and the underlying basal geology that pokes out amongst this fluvial mishmash making the aspect of the landscape and deflecting the currents of both water and air. The French vignerons knew that very early on, and this concept of terroir is bounded by this appreciation of numerous factors from the physical world combining with the growing and managing of specific varieties of vines to make superior wine. Very superior wine.
But let us take a step back before we discuss the geology of Saint-Emilion as promised. The geology of France is dominated by three major features, and this has controlled its agriculture, history and its peoples – below is a simplified geological map of France to provide some context to this sweeping statement. The first feature are the Massifs, or “basement” rocks that are very old and are composed of mixtures of granites and metamorphic rocks that are red, pink, browns and dark green on the map – these features sat out like islands during the phase which happened next and that was the slow filling of the Paris and Aquitaine Basins over 150 million years.
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The Basins were extremely stable for a long period of time and as there was very limited erosion from those Massifs which were pretty much very low lying or even possibly slightly under water themselves – the warmth of the oceans and the rapid growth of various forms of plankton meant that these basins became stacks of massive limestone deposits that we see today, with the famous White Cliffs of Dover being part of the western edge of the Paris Basin. Limestone underpins many wine regions as it is free draining, and often has clayey soils above it holding some moisture for the dry summers. Also, limestone is formed flat lying, so when tilted during tectonic events, plateaux and slopes are created, providing more access to the sun and creating a warmer setting for the vines when facing the right way.
The third major feature of the geology of France is the rise and rise of central France, and the Alps and Pyrenees to the south and east. As Africa moves north, it is crushing the southern Europe nations forming all the mountain ranges and causing the volcanic activities that traverse from Spain in the west to Turkey in the east – the rise of these mountains has had a powerful effect on the two basins in France, with major rivers from the rising mountain ranges cutting across the basins and depositing and eroding sediments at various times.
So, as we home in on Saint-Emilion we can use our understanding of the geology of France to match the features we see and how they were developed. Saint-Emilion is underlain by a stack of limestone formed in a shallow sea during a period of time about 25-22 million years ago called the Oligiocene. This limestone was at times quite dense with plankton “shells” and at other times less dense, and this formed layers (which after exposure to the air when the area was lifted from the seafloor), becoming both harder and softer, with the “hardest” limestone layer forming the “cap” of the area and underlain by a softer limestone. The lifting of the limestones was caused by that bully Africa pushing into Europe and pressing the Aquitaine basin as well as causing those mountain ranges to the south and east to rise dramatically.
With mountain ranges you develop the heads of rivers as rainfall landing on any mountain range sheds it in torrents, forming many of the major rivers throughout the world – from the Ganges next to the Himalayas, Amazon to the Andes, and the Nile to the Ethiopian Highlands. On a much smaller scale we have the Pyrenees for the Garonne and Central Massif for the Dordogne – both raised higher and higher as the final limestones of the Aquitaine Basin were being laid down.
We are moving fast here comrades, so hang on, this is where it becomes a little tricky, but I believe if you can follow this thread to the end it hopefully will be enlightening.
For the past 10-15 million years the area around Saint-Emilion has been lifted by the big squeeze, and then eroded by these fast-flowing rivers, cutting away the soft sediments and spreading them out across the basin surface and off into the Atlantic. The hard cap of limestone at Saint-Emilion managed to survive the sandpapering of the region, but all remnants of it to the west went missing due to this constant weathering assault. But then an interesting recent period has lately affected the earth known as an Ice Age, with the climate cycling with the “glacial” periods (i.e. ice accumulating on mountain ranges as glaciers and more northern expanses as ice sheets), and “interglacial” periods where the ice sheets and glaciers melt with a warming climate. The rivers draining the mountains during “glacial” periods ceased to have a lot of water flowing due to the ice never melting for long, and then during a “interglacial” these locked water sources started to melt, and rivers got back to business – sometimes with massive consequences. We are now (as I tap away at this keyboard), in an “interglacial” period and have been for a little while – which makes for summer holidays and more constant flowing rivers.
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The way that glacial periods end within the mountain ranges and ice sheets around the world can be pretty dramatic, with massive lakes forming on the melting ice and when the edge cracks – whooooosh down the slope goes this dramatic flood of water picking up all that ground-up rocks and sand formed by the retreating glaciers and ice sheets. This massive outpouring were moving these rocky materials at a great rate of knots and for very long distances. During one or two of those early glacial end times, the outflows left huge piles of rocks and sediment trash all around the base of the Saint-Emilion limestone hill – with the now most famous pile of rubble being Pomerol just to the northwest. The interglacial rocky outwash began to quieten down over time after each interglacial, with the rubble slowly worn away by the now flowing again river system, but a lot of this interglacial outwash did remain preserved during this game of rinse and repeat of approximately 800,000 years!
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Now with our geological glasses on, let us look at the geological map above (compiled by a guy called Dean Alexander who did a really interesting synopsis of the Saint-Emilion geology in his blog “Diary of a Wine Buyer”), and we can piece together all that we know. That brown layer to the bottom is our hard capping limestone that has withstood the test of time and made the hill and plateau which grows the vines near and around the town of Saint-Emilion itself. The purple g1a and g1b regions are the softer limestones underneath that hard limestone cap, they are more easily eroded and form the slopes down to the river basin, and as you get closer to the river itself you get this soft limestone having that massive barrage of glacial outwash rocks thrown across the surface of it. Where you see the Fu symbol, this is where you have glacial rocks from 400-800,000 years ago thrown up in piles and dumped like trash in Parisian streets. And lastly the sediments marked as CF define the more recent glacial outwash (much less dramatic now as the glaciers in later “glacials” are grinding finer and finer materials), and the material simply being eroded from the hills of Saint-Emilion and even from the Dordogne River itself as it meanders along, changing track every once and a while leaving washed river gravel or clay deposits in its wake.
And the outcome of you becoming an expert in the geology of Saint-Emilion and surrounds? You can now understand why certain areas within the region are more prized than others. The wineries of note in Saint-Emilion are predominantly located on the highest hard limestone capping around the town (Château Ausone, Château Pavie, Château Canon), and to the north on the remnants of the earliest interglacial outpourings (Château Figeac, Château Cheval Blanc). There are vineyards planted on the more recent sediments and soft limestones, but they are generally considered lesser sites and are given lower credibility (much to the anger of the owners of Château Croque Michotte for example as seen last report, who are located upon a mix of those more recent sediments and soft limestone), with less classified Châteaux seen in these geological settings.
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And lastly the Saint-Emilion / Pomerol connection with Blue Poles vineyard in little old Margaret River? Now for sure there is no mountain range dropping large swathes of glacial outwash here, let alone a large series of limestones rising to the east – the vineyard is planted upon a clay-rich sediment pile, with not a limestone to be seen. It is the gravel, our laterite gravel, as it is iron rich and it has variable sized pebbles and a variety of sands and clays mixed in – and the sizing of this material is very similar to the weathered glacial outwash dumped in a pile in Pomerol and western Saint-Emilion, the spiritual home of Merlot. Another aspect of Pomerol is the presence of a lot of clays at depth, and due to chance our gravels overlie a section of rich clays at a similar depth – we had a match! Climatically we are a little warmer, but it is surprisingly close as our maximum temperatures are modulated by an afternoon sea breeze that is not present in Pomerol and Saint-Emilion thus we end up with similar heat loads on our grapes.
Congratulations, you have made it!
Geology is all around and underneath you and is generally considered irrelevant. But it has defined empires, built cities, created cultures and perhaps most importantly, made it near impossible to drive quickly around Sydney’s northern suburbs. Next month’s topic may be a little bit easier to grasp (fingers crossed), but I hope you got to appreciate the view from a geological standpoint and learnt something a little different to the norm.
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Tracking, tracking...
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If every wine grower in Margaret River does not have a nervous tic yet, you could almost be assured that he smokes something other than tobacco. The days remain particularly pleasant with the “hot” days reaching their maximum but quickly abating as the sea breeze has managed to remain throughout the vintage to date and cooling the air before any vines and grapes are damaged by sunburn. It is a warm vintage now – in the top two or three since 2000, but how we sidestep through February and March will be all important to provide the quality we hope the grapes can live up to. All still seems well.
The numbers for the past three months and last year’s figures are provided below:
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The average maximum and minimum temperature averages for the 3 months were all lower in comparison to the values in 2023/24. Rainfall totals are higher in comparison to last year, but totals are still very low and typical of the season.

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Picking up the pace…
February will have us picking Chardonnay and Marsanne, putting on and taking off nets, waking up at ungodly hours, towing bins all over the countryside, and walking up and down rows every day. With the warmth of the vintage expected to continue for the first half of this month at least, we appear to have another warm vintage on our hands and the eternal debate of providing the vines with some water or not will return. The region is now on amber alert as the first white grapes will hit the receival bins in the coming week and that is always an exciting time.
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As always if you have any queries about what has been written or about wine in general, do not hesitate to contact us either by email, Instagram or Twitter and we will do our very best to answer any question.
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Cheers
Mark Gifford
Blue Poles Vineyard