Tubewood
One of the rewarding jobs in the vineyard is slashing the inter-row to keep the weed growth under control. It requires a bit of precision driving but when your ride-on mower is a carbon filtered, air-conditioned 85 hp Lambourghini with the stereo blasting out Dr J..it ain’t half bad.
Apparently Bloodwood is a difficult site to negotiate when your bottling line is designed for real wineries. This is Des the wonder truckie “driving” out after a bottling run. The inter-webs couldn’t handle him trying to reverse in for a bottling run. You should see him in Woolworth’s car park.
We live in a very dry continent and droughts are a real test for all of us. However, when we get a bumper winter wet season and the soil profile fills up, the landscape gives up it’s surplus moisture. Given the physical presence of the normally dry Bloodwood waterfall, it is wonderful to see it actually function as nature designed it to over millenniums.
Bottling can really shake up a new wine. This is the filler in action taking care of the Big Men In Tights. Carbon Dioxide flushing each bottle helps prevent oxidation which is the enemy of all wine.
This is the labelling machine in action after filling and capping has occurred. The BMIT then proceeds to the packing table where it is packed safely into boxes. This is an intense job which is repetitive, noisy and back breaking..in other words, from my point of view, thoroughly romantic. We can but hope.
The vast majority of wine grapes are mechanically harvested. In a good crop, this costs around $60/tonne. For that you get (in addition to grapes) Australian grape vine caterpillars, bird nests, bird nest poo, bearded dragons, eucalyptus and vine leaves, stalks and anything else that calls an after dark commercial vineyard home at harvest. If you elect to employ humans to hand pick, you get grapes and a bill of around $1200/tonne in a good crop. As I say, you get what you don’t pay for.
This is what happens when you drink too much Bloodwood Shiraz and someone owns up to owning a box of wigs and beards. Enjoy..it is five minutes of your life you will neither regret nor retrieve.
Wine making is basically pickin' it up and puttin' it down again. This chap seems to understand the existential importance of putting one foot in front of the other.
Bottling is a very stressful time for we here at Bloodwood. Dry goods need ordering and checking, wines need to be finally prepped, labour has to be organised and the weather gods have to be on your side with all that glass, wine, cardboard and plastic to re-arrange into the finished and boxed wine. But after all the cacophony of the production line it is re-balancing to retreat to the quiet solace of the vineyard.
We at the Bureau are quietly pleased to announce that this precious precocious hymn to 33 degrees,15 minutes South and 149 degrees, 2 minutes East has successfully transitioned form barrel to bottle.
Occasionally in winter we get a few days of snow. This is magic to experience in such a warm dry continent as Australia. This is a fall of extraordinarily large flakes one Sunday afternoon during a wine tasting at the cellar door. The juxtaposition of eucalyptus and snow flakes is just beautiful.
Visitors turn up to the cellar in all sorts of vehicles from Tesla’s to Toyotas, from Ferraris to Fords. This one full of long term Bloodwood devotees is a beautifully restored 1928 model from an era where things, like Bloodwood wines, were built to last.
Depending on variety, at Bloodwood, because we believe in flavour, we direct our secateurs towards 60,000 buds (or 120,000 bunches) per hectare. So if your average vine takes up 2.5 sq metres of vineyard floor, you have 4,000 vines across that hectare and need to prune to around 15 fruiting buds per vine. If your vine spacing is 1.5 metres, that means a bud per 10 cms (about a normally vigourous internodal spacing along a cane) or around one two-bud spur per 20 cms. Yes it is that prescriptive in, say Pinot Noir with an average bunch weight of 60 grams.
Weeds, particularly in a wet year like 2021, are a challenge in the vineyard. If they get out of control they can change the meso-climate of your site by decreasing air flow.