News from the Fernfield Wines Estate

An Exciting Time for Fernfield - Our First Mencia!

scott@sarbconsulting.com.au (Scott Barr) — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 01:35:39 GMT

Our New Challenge

We’re excited to finally be able to share something a little bit special to us — our first-ever Mencía wine! Planted, grown, fermented and matured by us, off the beaten track in our hidden little valley. We were drawn to Mencía for its unique character and interesting history, but also because it presented a new challenge we were keen to have our best crack at.

New in Australia, a variety first planted in 2011, at the time of writing we count Australian 12 Mencías (including ours). Our Mencía is a special graft developed by Yalumba nurseries, tailored to work in our region.

We've found it quite a unique vine, requiring a different approach to pruning and canopy management to our other varieties to achieve the most from it. It has taken us years of small, unreleased batches to get to our first release. We’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way, but each one has taught us something valuable, leading to this finished product we couldn't be prouder of!

A Little About Mencía

Mencía is a grape traditionally grown in the mountainous regions of north-western Spain, particularly in the Bierzo and Ribeira Sacra regions. It's only been in recent years that Mencía has really gained attention outside of Spain, getting love for its versatility and unique flavour profile.

It’s known for its bright acidity, vibrant red fruit flavours, and subtle hints of spice and earth. Able to be transformed into anything from fresh rosés to intense oaked reds, we loved the flexibility this variety provides, but we are particularly interested in adding a new and complex medium bodied red wine to our line-up.

Bringing This Unique Variety To Eden Valley

Eden Valley shares some features of the terroir of the northwestern Spanish mountains, with some interesting differences that allow us to create our own unique sense of place.

At around 400m, our little valley shares a similar altitude to areas such as Puente de Domingo Flórez in Bierzo and Amandi in Ribeira Sacra. Both regions feature shallow soils with rocky sub-layers, with even Eden Valley's famed rocky outcrops paralleled in some of Mencía's first vineyards.

The regions see similar summer temperatures, and are both internationally classed as Cool Climate wine regions, though many of the Spanish Mencía regions receive above 800mm of rainfall, often above 1m per year, compared to our 600mm average rainfall. The Bierzo region sees lower rainfall but this is compensated by higher humidity. While the similarities make for a great match for Mencía in Eden Valley, the drier conditions give us an opportunity to develop a more concentrated version of the wine.

In the vineyard we have seen a range of differences to our other varieties, requiring us to greatly adjust our approach. We've found the canopy to be less vigorous than our other varieties, while growing grape bunches that are large and closely packed. This combo makes the bunches more visible and and good target for pests such as birds and light brown apple moth, producing lower yield and quality in our first years.

We have since changed up the pruning methodology to reduce the congestion of the bunches, spreading out spurs and reducing the number of canes. We follow this up later in the season by opening the canopy further with a modified Smart-Dyson system, splitting the canopy into a vertical upward and downward canopy and then being more fastidious on our netting to ensure our little feathered friends can't get amongst the vines. It's a lot of work, but we're now seeing the results, which certainly makes it all worthwhile.

After multiple years of fine tuning in the vineyard and winery, we now have a Mencia we are really proud of and are ready to release it to you. What we’ve created is hopefully a Mencía that’s true to its roots yet reflective of Eden Valley. The wine certainly has some body to it, with a bright fruit character but with more depth and complexity that shows our land’s distinct qualities.

As far as we're aware it's the first Mencía bottled from Eden Valley fruit, which is pretty fun.

Join Us in the Celebration

We wanted to do something different for this special occasion. We've decided to make it cheaper to try our new wine, with cash back for a quick review of our Mencía on the Vivino app. Seems like a good way to help each other out and we can't wait to hear your thoughts on our wine and to get the word out on this variety.

If you submit a review of our Mencía on Vivino within 180 days of your online order, contact us we'll credit $50 to the payment method you used when ordering (you can also visit us at our cellar door to receive your cash-back in cold, hard, cash).

Our Mencía is now available for purchase through our website and our cellar door. We hope you’ll join us in raising a glass to this new chapter in our winemaking story.

Sincerely,

Scott and Bec

Frequently Asked Vintage Questions

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 01:36:49 GMT

It's vintage time in the Barossa! In between picking, pressing and fermenting grapes, Scott and I are still meeting our customers at the cellar door each Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

Below are answers to some of the most common questions we are asked during vintage time.

How do we decide when to pick grapes?

We use a range of factors to choose when to pick the grapes, with the most important being the various aspects of 'ripeness' of the fruit. these aspects include:

Baume: This is the sugar content, and therefore alcohol potential, of the grape. Whites are usually ripe at around 10.5-13.5 Baume, and reds at 13-15 Baume, and in March conditions in Eden Valley most varieties ripen at about 0.8-1 Baume per week. This is a good rough indicator but because seasons and vineyards vary, it's not enough to know if the grape is ripe.
Acidity: We measure the pH, and the 'titratable acidity' of juice, and it's more important in whites than reds. The titratable acidity is a better measure of how the wine will taste, a juice above 8.5g/L acidity will often be too tart (depending on the variety, style and sweetness we're aiming for), and many years we pick whites as soon as the acidity has dropped past 8.5.
Grape taste & looks: As well as these simple measurements, we also look at a range of factors on the grape itself: How plump it feels, the colour of the seeds and stems, how thick the pulp is, and how the juice and skins taste.

Based on these ripeness aspects, we will look at the weather forecast to predict how long it is until the grape is ready to pick. Hot weather ripens faster than cold, up to about 36deg. Above 36 it's possible for the vines to shut down and stop ripening entirely until the weather cools down, so it's important we test grapes just before and after heatwaves like the one we've just had. As we get closer to ripe we will test more and more often, to drill down to the exact date we want to pick.

What do you do with the pressed grape skins?

We feed them to our sheep!

A lot of wineries send away their grape skins to be processed and distilled into spirits, and some others compost them for a few years to convert them to mulch for the vines, but for us, we find it's best to feed them to our wooly little friends, since it's a good source of nutrition during a dry time of year, it keeps flies away, and they enjoy it! Whenever we bring a bin full of grape skins over the sheep get excited, I guess it's not just humans who value wine!

Why do we control temperature in the winery?

Once the grapes are picked, we use temperature control for a few reasons:

To prevent unwanted fermentation: With white grapes, we generally want a crisp, bright wine without round, 'fluffy' characters, and to do this, we want the juice to settle for a few days before we start fermentation, and let heavier components settle out of the juice. Of course anyone who has left fruit juice out of the fridge knows that you can't just let juice sit around warm, or it will start fermenting. So we keep white juice below 5deg for a few days to let it settle without fermenting, known as 'cold settling'.
For optimal fermentation: The yeast that convert sugar to alcohol have an ideal temperature where they're happiest. For more red yeasts this is 20-30deg, and 12-18deg for whites. If we are outside these temperatures, the yeast can become stressed and create off-flavours. Within the yeast's happy range, we also adjust temperatures to promote certain flavours to develop, which is dependant on the grape, the yeast, and the style we're aiming for.
To promote tartrate deposition: In white wines, later in the process just before bottling, we will once more drop the wine temperature to near freezing. This time, it's to let a thing called tartrates drop out of the wine, so they don't end up in the bottle. Tartrates form naturally in wine, but in a bottle, they can look unsightly (they're called 'wine diamonds' which sounds nice, but they sometimes look more like snow than diamonds). This process is called 'cold stabilisation'.

How do we control temperatures in the winery?

We use a glycol chiller to cool our juice and wine. This is big box with a compressor that cools down a mixture of water and glycol to cold temperatures. The chiller then pumps the liquid through hoses around the winery, where we have hollow stainless steel plates and tubes which we immerse in the wine, and hollow chambers around tanks (known as 'jackets'), which the glycol mixture is pumped through to cool down the wine.

Why glycol and not just water? The problem is that water freezes! We often want temperatures below zero, so glycol helps keep water in a liquid phase.

Sometimes we don't want to cool the wine - we want to warm it. For example red wine ferments, and warming up white juice after cold settling. For this we use the same jackets & plates, but use warm water instead of chilled glycol.

Becoming a Wine Aroma Pro

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:29:52 GMT

Why learn about wine aromas?

For us as winemakers, it's our job to understand wine aromas - we use the aroma of the wine in many decisions in the winery, such as barrel selections, time on oak and blends (see our blog post Winery Secrets Revealed on how winemaking decisions and aromas interact).

But what about someone who just wants to enjoy wines? Why take the time to learn about aromas? Here's three good reasons:

It's actually a great game to test out your senses - by yourself or with a group of friends - to try and detect a detail like grape variety, the age of the wine, or even wine faults.
Secondly knowing what wine descriptors you do and don't like can help with selecting a wine based on its label. Maybe you don't like heavy oak influence so characters such as vanilla and coconut might indicate a wine isn't for you, or you really love a Shiraz with black pepper notes.
Finally, for a lot of people, concentrating on and taking in a wine's aromas can give a sense of presence and invoke memories - leading to a more enjoyable experience when drinking wine.

Now you know the why, read on to learn the how.

Identifying dominant aromas

There are hundreds of chemical aromas that are naturally formed in wines; we are just looking to pick out the dominant ones. To help isolate a particular aroma amongst everything that is hitting your nose, an aroma kit is often used to train your brain. We have compiled a range of aromas and lined up them up with wines.

Below shows how we have grouped the wine aromas.

Your own aroma kit

By now I'm sure you have become a wine aroma kit enthusiast and decided you need one of your own. If you Google 'Wine Aroma Kit', you'll quickly realise that they are stupidly expensive and lose all that enthusiasm. But luckily, we've got your back!

Our 2023 Spring Experience Eden package includes our very own wine aroma kit, which we've put together, providing a range of common wine aromas, along with four of our wines with a guide on using the kit to study the wines.

What’s included:

A guide to introduce wine aromas
An official wine aroma wheel
A kit of wine aromas to help you pick out dominant aromas
Four bottles of our wines, each with an aroma guide and matching aromas from the kit
2022 Hidden Valley Riesling
2021 Her Grenache
2018 Wayward Girl
2019 Gold Leaf Reserve Cabernet

The package is available as part of our Experience Eden subscription from $129, or as a one-off order for $149.

Pruning trade secrets

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 07:00:12 GMT

Not as straightforward as you'd think...

The complex strategy of pruning is often a surprise to guests visiting our vineyard on a Winery Tour, with comments along the lines of "I didn't realise there was so much thought in it!" being very common. The truth is, pruning is an incredibly important part of growing winegrapes, and industry knowledge has come a long way in recent years, meaning there's far more to it than the old assumption of just choosing between cane or spur, and how many buds you leave.

The Basics

The basic & traditional principles of grapevine pruning are:

Buds you leave on one-year-old wood will grow into a cane that will fruit well
Buds you leave on older wood will grow canes known as 'watershoots' that won't grow much fruit
The more buds you leave, the smaller each individual cane will be.

Leaving too many buds can result in too much shade in your canopy, reducing wine quality and increasing disease risk, but leaving too few buds can result in excessively long canes, and reduce the yield potential of the vine, so it's a fine balance. Most growers find between 20 and 30 buds one one-year-old wood per vine is a sweet spot.

The two most common structures used in Aussie vineyards are spur pruning and cane pruning with some canopy catch wires. Spur pruning leaves a permanent T-shaped vine of older wood (a vertical trunk and horizontal arms), with 10-15 little spurs left behind on the arms each season, each spur containing 2 buds. This has the advantage that you've got a big chunky arm 'pipeline' to carry nutrition and water throughout the plant, but it has the downside that there's more opportunity for watershoots, and the productivity of the vine is reliant on that permanent arm being healthy (see below!). Cane pruning maintains only a permanent vertical trunk, and each year two long canes from last year's growth are kept, with all other growth removed, and these two canes bent down to form this year's horizontal arms. Cane pruning is more labour intensive than spur pruning and grows less evenly, but reduces the number of watershoots you need to manage and produces fewer, but larger bunches, which can make picking easier.

Despite what some enthusiastic wineries on either side of the fence say, research has found no difference in yield or quality between the two methods, the best choice depends on what canopy management is in place and what the grower prefers.

There are other pruning systems used - such as bush vines, or mechanical pruning - but spur and cane pruning makes up the vast majority of Aussie vineyards.

Smart-Dyson Canopy System

We've written previously about our use of Smart-Dyson canopy management in our vineyard . We converted the Shiraz two years ago and the Cabernet Sauvignon last year, and we are beyond thrilled with the improvement in vineyard performance and wine characters. So this year, the rest of the vineyard is getting the same medicine!

In a nutshell, Smart-Dyson involves using wires to manage the canopy. Smart-Dyson improves ripening rate, reduces disease risk and increases the production of colour & certain beneficial flavours in the grape skin, so it is well suited to cool-climate regions like Eden Valley.

Now we're going to get a little more of the fun (well I find it fun), we've actually custom modified the Smart-Dyson standard system to more of what's called 'The Solar Collector' and then we've added to it the 'Lazy Ballerina' shading system. To break that down a little, the solar collector, rather than pointing straight down, is folded down and to the side, which allows maximum sunlight during early stages of the grape development and then as the bunch gets bigger and heavier it tucks in under the foliage for shading during summer.

The Lazy ballerina aspect as basically a little tilt on the top of the canopy, in our case to the west, to provide some bunch shading during the hottest part of the day. Check out our little diagram of how we adjust our canopy over the season (image below). There are now years of research into the affects of sunlight, from the now-classic 'Sunlight Into Wine' by Mike Robinson and Richard Smart (yes that 'Smart') to dozens of studies since narrowing down the best times to let in the light!

Our Shiraz. On the left you can see the Eastern side of a row with all the canes pointing up. On the right is the western side of a row with curved canes going downwards

To facilitate a Smart-Dyson canopy, we are using spur pruning, with spurs facing the directions we want our canopy to grow - so each vine has about 8 spurs pointing up, and 6 spurs pointing west. No spurs point east, which will help us later when we're lifting the canopy on the East, and lowering almost the canopy on the west.

Soft Pruning

A new school of thought (well possibly revisiting some traditional approaches) has come up in the past few years, led by an Italian team Simonit & Sirch. I'm proud to say Scott was an early adopter of the S&S principles, using Google Translate to read about their ideas before their books were published in English. It's now become pretty mainstream and recommended by the AWRI while being used in a growing number of vineyards.

The key point of S&S 'soft pruning' theory is that when you cut live wood, you damage the plant, and the dieback caused by the cut will restrict sap flow past the wound. This will reduce the health and productivity of the vine. There's a lot of sensible reasons behind this theory, and so we adopted soft pruning last winter.

Work Cut Out for Us

As well as managing Smart-Dyson and soft pruning principles, our team is also managing disease risk by painting all cuts with an anti-fungal paint, and removing all the wood we cut off from the vineyard (as dead wood can carry diseases).

It's a massive undertaking, and one we have found from experience can only be done by an incredibly trustworthy team. We've had both good and bad experiences with employing people to prune, but in every case we've found that someone who cares about the outcome and want to do a good job is better than a professional who is trying to get the job done quickly.

Lucky for us, the perfect team was available this year,

One day a week, every week this winter, both sets of parents are coming out and cutting, painting, lugging cuttings and generally being the best pruning team a winery could hope for. So far the result is wonderful, the vineyard looks the best it ever has and we're excited to see it grow in Spring!

Also, shout out to Albus, the world's first pruning Labradoodle, who tried so hard to help pull the canes off the vines for us, only to get too tired and need a little rest...

The Cheesiest of Wine Pairings

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 05:54:36 GMT

Perhaps the 10,000 ^th wine & cheese pairing guide, but certainly the best one

We love a good wine pairing, whether it's something we develop or if we sit back and experience someone else's handiwork, we find that it can really elevate a wine experience to something special.

So it’s not really surprising that with the quality of local cheese and our passion for pairing that our upcoming Experience Eden package features the classic pairing of wine and cheese.

We’re lucky in the Barossa to have such a well-loved and award winning cheesery* as Barossa Valley Cheese Company , so we didn’t have to look far to find a wide range of yummy cheeses. We read just about every wine & cheese pairing guide on the web, along with some actual scientific papers, then bought a range of cheeses and did the hard yards tasting them together.

As you’ll read below, and in common with all pairing principles, there isn’t a hard and fast set of rules to obtain a perfect cheese & wine pairing. And even if there were, each manufacturer’s cheese, and each winery’s wine are all different, so we went into our tasting with open eyes – and by gosh we’re glad we did, because Bec’s nerdy table saying which wines should end up with which cheeses didn't always hit the spot. Our final pairs are quite different to what we expected based on theory, but the logic holds up and our hired help taste testers promise they are wonderful together.

*not technically a word…

The art of balance

One key principle in pairing any food with wine is balance. Sometime balance means matching, sometimes it means opposing, depending on what you’re working with.

For example – the more obvious one is that you wouldn’t paid a huge, bold Shiraz with a light, delicate meal, because one overpowers the other getting the taste of only one rather complimentary flavours. Additionally to avoid a sweet overload you wouldn’t pair a sweet dessert wine with a rich, sweet dessert – because they’re both too sweet, it’s out of balance. To get balance, we need to balance both matching and opposing elements, if we want the pairing to be better than the individual parts (which we do).

The factors we’re working with here are tannin/fat balance, intensity, texture, flavours and acidity. The best pairing will generally come from matching at least one factor, while opposing at least one other.

Tannin / fat

Research has shown that balancing tannin & fat is one of the key reasons wine and cheese work so well together. You can read one of the research papers here , but in short, fat and tannin effectively neutralise one another in the mouth, so the fat in cheese reduces the bitterness of wine, while the tannin in wine reduces the greasiness of cheese.

For this factor, the more tannin in the wine, the fattier the cheese needed to pair.

Our higher tannin wine in our pairing is the 2015 His Grenache, and not surprisingly, this paired wonderfully with one of the highr fat cheeses, the Alexandrina Vintage Cheddar. The other high-fat cheese, the Barossa Triple Cream, ended up as the pair for our second bold red, the 2014 Shiraz-Cabernet.

Intensity

This is a factor that is usually matched, rather than opposed, and our selected pairings are no exception. Generally, if one half of the pairing has much higher intensity than the other, it will overpower and make the other half taste bland.

Red wines are in danger of overpowering a lot of the more delicate, younger cheeses. We certainly saw this in our pairings – none of the curds, ricotta, feta type cheeses could hold their own against any of our red wines, and both of the cheeses we ended up pairing with reds are fairly intense.

Conversely, strong cheeses (I’m looking at you, Blue) overpower a lot of wines. In fact, none of our wines’ intensity matched blue, and the only wine we liked as a blue pairing was one that would have broken the rule of matching intensity – our dessert wine*.

*Even though we liked the pairing, the Feta pairing was even better, so blue didn’t make the cut.

Texture

This is an area we can match or contrast for sound pairings. The oozy Barossa Washrind pairs well with our softest wine, our 2020 All Peachy Rose. Both have a delicate, creamy texture, both with underlying intensity which, as per above, is also well-matched.

Conversely, the creamy texture of the Triple Cream was quite a contrast to our big, bold Shiraz-Cabernet, but they balance one another perfectly, because they’re balanced in tannin/fat and they’re both strong in intensity.

Flavour

The flavours we focus on for cheese & wine pairings are mostly sweetness and saltiness. In general, this a matter of opposing and balancing out flavours – a salty cheese cuts through a sweet wine, creating a balanced taste. This is shown in the pairing of our 2016 Late Harvest Semillon dessert wine with the salty Barossa Feta.

Saltiness can also highlight fruit flavours in a wine, which is one reason our His Grenache works so well with the Alexandrina Vintage Cheddar – the cheddar highlights the fruit characters in the Grenache.

Acidity

Unlike saltiness, acidity seems to work better when matched. There’s little research on this, but my expectation is that it’s because wine has a very narrow range of ideal acidities – too much acid and it’s unpleasantly sharp, too little acid and it’s unpleasantly bland. If you try to use an acid-opposed cheese to change the taste of a wine, it will move the wine into ‘unpleasant’ territory. Feta is one of the most acidic cheeses, so works well with our acidic 2016 Late Harvest Semillon dessert wine.

The Result

So our final selected pairings were:

2020 all Peachy Rose, with Barossa Valley Cheese Company's Washrind cheese
2015 His Grenache with Alexandrina Vintage Cheddar
2014 Old River Red Shiraz-Cabernet with Barossa Valley Cheese Company's Triple Cream
2016 Late Harvest Semillon paired with Barossa Valley Cheese Company's Feta

You can try these for yourself in our Spring Experience Eden package, orders close Friday 10 September unless sold out prior*.

*This is a genuine likelihood, not sales-spin. We only have limited bottles left of the 2020 All Peachy Rose, which we’ve been holding aside for this package. After the subscribers who already have dibs on most of the remaining bottles, we only have a few packages left until we sell out.

Appointments For Better Experiences

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 05:25:13 GMT

Managing our little cellar door during COVID has resulted in a number of learnings for us including a surprise one, that both our visitors and us have really enjoyed our booked experiences. Making an appointment means we can do a range of fun wine experiences which just can't work when we're flat out with lots of guests.

This more personalised experience means plenty of one-on-one time to not only learn about our wines and all the winemaking, but also adapting to what you're feeling on the day such as a tour, getting through all the questions you might have about wine, maybe a little of the latest local banter or a serene picnic out on our lawn doing your own thing.

We know sometimes booking can be a chore, so we've made it as easy. We've set it up so you can book on our website, directly from Facebook or Google, the old fashioned way by just giving Bec a call on 0402 788 526 or send through an email on rebecca@fernfieldwines.com.au. We are really happy to have you visit whatever way works best for you.

Unique Experiences

We are loving the extra winery tours we've been running lately, as visitors are looking for something a bit more immersive than normal tastings, and improve their ability to drop winemaking facts on family and friends.

Visitors have, without exception, told us they've had a great time learning more about how wines are made, including Bec's patented random tid-bits (did you know sunlight exposure on bunches in spring makes the final wine darker in colour?), and at the right time of year*, you can see and participate in the winemaking action.

We have even more fun with the Play the Winemaker experiences - like the pic above, you make your own blend of wine from three of our wines, including learning about wine types and styles, and take home a labelled bottle of your own blend. It's especially entertaining in groups.

Both of these experiences can now be booked online for any time of day, as late as the day before, and can sometimes be booked on the day (give us a call, it depends on what's going on).

And soon (ish, after vintage is finished) we will be re-starting our most-beloved Chocolate & Wine Pairing experiences... stay tuned to hear about those!

* Now. Now is the right time of year. Vintage, through March-April, is when you've got a good chance of tasting & testing grapes with us, helping plunge an active ferment or even seeing an actual crush or press. If you visit in May you get to taste weird and wonderful freshly-pressed reds still going through secondary ferment. From June it's back to winery tours with a range of tastings from the barrel, which are also good fun.

Guided Tastings

For those just looking to taste wine, our free guided flight with the winemaker can also be booked for any time of day, and can be booked on the day (Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Mondays) by phone.

Hosted in our 1856 cottage, or on the verandah in nice weather, you'll taste a flight of six of our wines including whites, reds and dessert wine, with the winemaker taking you through the background of each wine and behind the scenes stories.

Not a hard and fast rule

Although we're by appointment, we won't have the guards at the gate ready to pounce on anyone without a booking.

For a start, we'll be open Easter all long weekend and probably future long weekends too - we'll announce on Social Media. After Covid we also plan to have live music weekends where we'll be open and have an acoustic set going.

Secondly, if you drop by without a booking during our traditional opening days of Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, there's a still a fairly good chance we'll be able to welcome you, so if you can't book ahead, give us a call when you're on your way, or when you reach the gate (we don't recommend this as we hate to disappoint anyone, but if you do make it to our gate and we can't help you out, we can send you to other great wineries nearby).

Winery Secrets Revealed: How Aromas and Flavours Are Really Created In Wine

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 03:59:37 GMT

I ntroduction: An Imperfect Science

There's often talk of wine tasting being an art, rather than a science. Wine chemistry is definitely a complicated form of science, but the current technology just isn't good enough to measure many wine aromas, and here arises the art. For example, a recent study on wine compounds called mercaptans* could measure down to a very impressive 0.0000000001%, however the human nose can still detect smaller quantities 1 .

*Mercaptans, also known as Thiols, are a complicated group of molecules that can impart both positive characters (for example in Sauvignon Blanc), or depending on the particular mercaptan, the concentration, and the wine style, they can also be considered a fault.

There's also the complication that people are not all the same. Everyone has different sensory thresholds - both through physical differences and different life experiences - and so will literally taste & smell different things in wine.

Between these two factors, wine aromas are still not particularly well understood. Even where there's fairly universally agreed on characters in wine, such as pepper aroma in shiraz*, research is still in progress studying why it actually occurs 2 .

*About 1 in 4 people cannot, regardless of training or experience, detect pepper in red wine 3 . It's called rotundone anosmia, if you want to pull out fancy words at a dinner party.

As such, if you're in a high pressure wine tasting situation and don't know what to say you smell in a wine, feel free to make it up - say it confidently, use an aroma that is aligned with the type of wine you're drinking*, and if anyone challenges you, just claim the sensory threshold is below their detection level.

*You can find aroma wheels or lists that are specific to different varietals. Customers can use Aromaste r at our cellar door but WineFolly also has a few infograms on their websit e which are free.

So now I've told you how much we don't know, here's some stuff we do!

First things first. From a common question asked at the cellar door, Winemakers don't directly add flavours to wine. A wine that we say has 'strawberry' characteristics has never had strawberries added, for instance. The tastes and aromas in wine come from a combination of the grape, the fermentation process, and oak ageing.

D evelopment In The Vineyard

I t's no surprise that the grape affects the aromas of the wine - hence why we use different varieties of grape for different wines!

For example, compounds known as volatile thiols play a key role in Sauvignon Blanc, such as the molecule 3-sulfanylhexan-1-ol (3SH), which gives grapefruit and passionfruit characteristics in own tropical fruit focused Sauvy " Our Little Secret ".

But vineyard practices also influence which aromas we'll find in the final wine.

Fruit exposed to sunlight will have lower concentrations of methoxypyrazines, the compound responsible for fresh green and herb characters in Cabernet Sauvignon. In the vineyard, we can choose to expose the fruit to reduce these characters, or we can choose to shade the berries and aim for a fresher style Cab, such as the 2017 Wayward Girl , which has fresh herb characters that make it perfect for a summer red.

Also, those 3SH molecules that give our Sauvy it's character? They are also affected by what we do in the vineyard. Good levels of nitrogen in the soil improves the amount of 3SH, as does mild water stress 4 .

Weirdly enough, most varietal aromas can't be smelled in the grape, it isn't until they are transformed during the fermentation that they are detectable, which leads to…

Development During Fermentation

Grape-derived aromas are 'released' during fermentation, but the yeast that ferments the grapes also impart some of their own flavours.

For example, some yeasts produce esters (bright, fruity characters like pineapple or strawberry). Esters are quite an unstable molecule - they're one of the aromas that decline with ageing, which is partially why some awesome fruity wines don't age particularly well. So a yeast that creates a lot of esters will produce fresh and fruity characters, but we shouldn't rely on those aromas lasting for 10+ years.

β-damascenone (pronounced beeta-dama-seen-own) is another aroma strongly influenced by yeast, and enhances fruity notes and masks green aromas in red wines 5 .

Fermentation temperature has a massive effect on which aroma compounds form. For example those fruity esters I mentioned earlier become unstable in a warmer ferment and don't make it through to the final wine.

Malolactic Fermentation (also known as secondary fermentation), used in red wines and some white wines, can also impart flavours to wine, most notably diacetyl. Diacetyl gives wine a buttery aroma and enhances the wines complexity 6 . It's become a love-it or hate-it aroma when it comes to Chardonnay!

Development During Maturation

Cis-oak lactone is a molecule responsible for the typical 'oak' flavour in red wines that have been aged in oak barrels, so much so that it's named after oak. There are also other compounds that come from oak barrels, such as eugenol, which imparts a 'spice' character - likely an aroma contributor in our American oak aged 'His' Grenache .

The choice of oak has a major role to play in how these characters form; new or aged, American or French, fire or water bent, Barrique or Hogshead etc… Barrels are a whole world-within-a-world within winemaking!

Once the wine has made it into the bottle, all the decisions we've made have combined together to give the final product - a complex mixture of contains more than 1000 grape, fermentation and maturation aromas 7 .

Thanks for reading, be sure to check out some of our other articles below!

References (nerd alert!)

Szymanski, E. Sulfur dioxide, aroma, and the law of unintended consequences. Wine & Viticulture Journal 35(3), 16–19; 2020
AWRI project 3.1.1
Wood, C.; Siebert, T. E.; Parker, M. et al. Determination of Rotundone, the Pepper Aroma Impact Compound, in Grapes and Wine, J. Agric. Food Chem. 56, 3738-3744; 2008
Peyrot des Gachons et al. , The influence of water and nitrogen deficit on fruit ripening and aroma potential of Vitis vinifera L. cv Sauvignon blanc in field conditions. J. Sci. Food Agric., 85, 73–8; 2005
Pineau et al, Which impact for b-damascenone on red wines aroma? J. Agric. Food Chem. 55, 4103-4108; 2007
Reynolds AG et al; Managing Wine Quality Volume 2: Oenology & Wine Quality. Woodhead Publishing; 2010.
Maarse and Vischer. Volatile Compounds in Food. Alcoholic Beverages. Qualitative and Quantitative Data. Food Analysis Institute. 1989

Do wine & coffee mix?

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 02:15:16 GMT

The science of tasting and our new "Vitality" blend

Our Spring Experience Eden pack brings together two of our favourite things – wine and coffee. But do they belong together?

Yes!

Of course I would say that, I’ve literally made a wine that puts them together…

But it’s true! Wine and Coffee are kindred spirits, both sharing flavour and aroma characteristics, and even with remarkably similar aroma wheels.

Remind me what all these terms mean?

But what about literally drinking wine and coffee together?

My brain wants to tell me no, but after numerous careful blends, our taste testers can confirm for you, it totally works.

Our Vitality wine and coffee blend pairs our barrel matured 2015 Eden Valley Merlot with Bean Addition’s Cold Brewed coffee, which gives a smoother, fruity flavour compared to hot brewed coffee. Mocha notes from the 36-month barrel aged Merlot pair seamlessly with the smooth cold brew coffee, the two were carefully blended to highlight both coffee and wine characters.

How to best enjoy the wine

We have done the hard yards in extensively testing this wine to give you validated advice on how to best enjoy it.

Like most reds, we recommend drinking Vitality at room temperature (18 deg). It doesn’t need to be decanted, but it won’t hurt. The wine will stay fresh for a few days, though after more than three days open the coffee character might start to fade a touch.

It’s great on its own, or you could pair it with food – a roast dinner would go perfectly. We’ve also found it goes down quite nicely in coffee’s traditional role after a meal.

You've sold me

The best way to get a dose of Vitality is in our Spring Experience Eden Pack, which includes a bottle of Vitality, a 250g pack of Bean Addition’s Fernfield Blend coffee beans and a grinder and pourer to enjoy the beans. It also includes a bottle each of our Wayward Girl (which is perfect for this Spring weather!), our new 2020 Riesling and our new 2015 Gold Leaf Reserve Shiraz.

Vitality is also available in six-packs , if one bottle doesn’t sound like enough.

Visiting Eden Valley Wineries in 2020

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 07:58:06 GMT

How to enjoy our Valley of Eden in a Covid world

It has been wonderful this past week to finally be able to welcome back visitors to our cellar door after almost four months closed. We're lucky in South Australia that restrictions are starting to ease, and we're all finding our feet in this 'new normal' - staying safe while enjoying being able to go out and have fun again!

Like most cellar doors in our region, we are requiring bookings for all visitors. We know it can be inconvenient but it is critical as government regulations limit the number of visitors we can host at once and impose extra cleaning requirements between guests.

To make it as easy as possible for you, we've set up bookings direct from our website , from Google, or from Facebook (or you can even go old-school and phone us ). And to help you plan your trip, we've compiled the latest information on all the Eden Valley cellar doors' opening hours and booking requirements below.

A few reasons to visit Eden Valley

Fernfield Wines (that's us!) - Open 11-4 Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday with a booking for wine tastings, winery tours and Play the Winemaker blending experiences. Book an experience on our website . Note wine & chocolate pairings and craft beer are both currently unavailable.
Brockenchack - Open by appointment any day
Edenmae Estate - No tastings available yet but platters and wine by the glass available weekends 12-5pm, and wine by the glass Friday 3-5pm
Flaxman Wines - Open Saturday 11-5 and Sunday 11-4, bookings preferred. Book a tasting or lunch on their website.
Heathvale - Open by appointment any day.
Henschke - Open 9am-4:30pm Monday to Saturday with a booking.
Hutton Vale - Open by appointment any day. Book a tasting on their website.
Max & Me (at the Eden Valley Hotel ) - Tastings 11-5pm daily, no booking required.
Poonawatta - Open by appointment any day
Yalumba - Open Daily 10-5 with a booking for wine tastings or tours. Book a tasting or tour on their website.
Thorn-Clarke - Open for sales only (no tastings) Mon to Fri 9-5
Taste Eden Valley - closed until further notice

Note this information is up to date as of Friday 11th September 2020, I can't guarantee it will stay this way for too long, so best bet is to follow the links to book ahead!

Want more information to plan your visit to Eden Valley? Visit our regional website to find accommodation and activities and learn more about our region and our heritage.

Experience Eden Wine Subscription

Fri, 15 May 2020 07:08:24 GMT

We're Creating Adventures in Wine Packages

We're excited to finally be ready to launch our long-planned wine subscription, Experience Eden!

This is an idea that's been in the works for a long time, with our main goal:

Make it more than packaged wine, make it an experience, make it fun

We have played with the concept for a while now and have previously put together some fun packages ad-hoc, which has been great for us to experience with you and build upon. Some friends and customers have said the following about our previous offerings:

"Hello Bec, Scott & Xavier, Thankyou for your shipment of the Special wines with chocolate for pairing. We only had one problem with the wine/chocolate pairing, neither lasted the distance. Looks like we need to order more next time around.” Don & Jenny

We're now ready to share the result of efforts: Experience Eden!

What it is

Experience Eden is a wine subscription, where we package up four of our boutique bottles of wine with some form of indulgence, something rare or special, for you to enjoy and all guided through by us, the owner/winemakers, Scott & Bec.

For example, the first package will be our Perfect Pairing Wine & Chocolates, including four bottles of wine and four 100g blocks of chocolate that we make to specifically match the wines, after our recent Self Isolation Packs sold out so quickly. You can read about the full first year of packages on the Experience Eden page.

We select the wines for each package, based on the theme of the pack, along with seasonal conditions and including a wide range of our wine selection.

Future packages will include local produce and wine, special wines not available to the public, and different gifts, with each package including value of at least $170 RRP .

The packages come down to $129 if you go three-monthly, or $135 for six-monthly, with free postage to capital cities and subsidised postage to country areas.

So that is 8 or 16 bottles a year, with fun experiences and indulgences, all delivered to be enjoyed at home or with friends.

Why it's good

There are a lot of wine subscriptions out there, so why choose ours?

It's fun

Experience Eden is designed as a gift for yourself* rather than a simple transactional wine box. It includes wine and treats for you to enjoy, along with tasting and behind-the-scenes information.

*Or for someone else, see below

It's a unique offer

Our wines aren't the common stuff available at Dan's. Our wines aren't available from any retailers, or pretty much anywhere other than for our members, on our website, and at our cellar door (when it opens again!).

Beyond that, Experience Eden will include products that aren't for sale on our online store, and sometimes not even at the cellar door. For example - the chocolate blocks in the first offer! We will also include little experimental wine batches and other wines we don't usually sell.

It's a good price!

Experience Eden represents 23-30% off RRP and are less than $140 for each package. Members who stick with the subscription for two or more packages also receive automatically our coveted Gold Leaf Membership.

This is 'part of the family' level of membership which provides deeper discounts and we try our absolute best to deliver whatever our Gold Leaf members ask for! Gold Leaf members receive discounts on all our range, exclusive wines that are too small batches to release to the public, back-vintage offers, and offers and experiences that we only offer the special few.

You can gift one or more your packages to a friend

Don't think you'll drink 16 bottles in a year? It's really easy to redirect any of your packages to a friend, and you can even include a gift message, which will be included as a hand-written note to your recipient. And voila, you've delivered an easy birthday/Christmas/random gift and they'll think you're the best friend ever (and rightfully so!)

You can just buy one

Afraid of commitment? That's cool. You can buy a single package for $149 and get it delivered to yourself or a friend.

Still not convinced?

Wow, tough sell! Here's a photo of a baby alpaca:

Isolation Entertainment

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 23:44:49 GMT

Firstly a massive thanks and sympathy for those who are on the other end of the scale and are working long thankless hours to keep the country running and community healthy. Thank you.

But for the majority of us, the short term future is at home, so we thought we'd put together some ideas to keep people in isolation entertained.

Our little man Xavier recommends a picnic under an old tree (see his favourite tree above), while Scott the green thumb suggests enjoying the sunshine and getting on top of your garden.

With many service providers giving away free internet data, here's our...

Netflix streaming recommendations:

Relaxed Fun: 'The Good Place' - Easy and good fun
For A Laugh: 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' - Sure to get you chuckling
Mind Bender: 'Maniac' - The weirdest thing in this is not how quickly Jonah Hill changed to a skinny fella for the role
For The Family: 'Matilda' - Can't go past revisiting classic Roald Dahl
Easy Action/Drama: 'Logan Lucky' - A fun heist movie with a great cast, Ocean's Eleven, bogan style.
Binge Series: 'Living With Yourself' - Who doesn't love the ageless Paul Rudd, although he's a little more serious in this one than usual

Good books:

Even if you don't want to go to the library or the bookstore, Ebooks are so easy to buy from home, and libraries these days let you download audiobooks and Ebooks for free from home (you probably already knew that, but I only learnt it recently and it blew my mind!).

Scott's currently reading "South Sea Vagabonds" by John Wray, while Bec is immersed in Brandon Sanderson's fantasy series "The Stormlight Archives". If you're looking for something a little deeper, Robert Sapolsky's "Behave" and Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens" we can certainly recommend.

For the budding home winemaker, jump on Daniel Pambianchi's "Techniques in Home Winemaking" or for those a little more serious "Viticultulture" by Dry & Coombe is the classic go-to reference.

That make me think, a great activity to try this time of year is to grab a big buckets of grapes and make your own wine!

Winemaking

This process varies from foot-stomping grapes in a bucket, letting it ferment and settle, then putting it in a bottle, all the way up to the understanding and application of organic chemistry (for those strange few that find chemistry fun). We're always happy to help and find it a fun experience to share, get in touch for more info at whatever level your interested in or join up a group we've been developing for fun, the Facebook group "Aussie Winemaking".

A great guide to starting with winemaking is available from MoreWine: https://morewinemaking.com/web_files/intranet.morebeer.com/files/wredw.pdf (pdf download)

Activities with kids

Having our child home full-time has really made us appreciative of our childcare centre and our grandmother-babysitters! Here is a massive list online of activities to do with kids, ranging from home-schooling resources, to virtual zoo tours, to learning foreign languages: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10160193011426515&id=760581514

What we've been up to:

We amongst a lucky few who can escape cabin fever by exploring outside, and have been spending lots of time playing on our property with Xavier and having picnics. Of course we're also still working! In amongst vintage operations we started building new signs (not the best timed project, in hindsight, since the cellar door is now closed, d'oh!), and have been busy packing and posting wine for online orders. We've also taken the opportunity to do some organising; putting up shadowboards in the workshop, Marie Kondo'ing our wardrobes, and helping Xavier sort through his toys.

We're looking forward to when we can re-open our cellar door and spend more fun times with customers, but just like everyone else we're happy to do our part for the community and we're getting to knock off a few projects and spend quality time as a family!

Vintage Preparation

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 07:45:11 GMT

What we get up to while waiting for the grapes to ripen...

Spring Vineyard Management

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 23:27:55 GMT

Spring is a hugely important time for optimising wine quality - even though the wine isn't even in berry-form yet!

The season so far has been a mixed-bag. Like most of Australia, Eden Valley is very dry, and late frosts were threatening, but the canopies are looking good and the bunches are promising.

Maybe it's just because we're a family of farming nerds, but we find the complexities in vineyard management fascinating - there's so much to think about to maximise grape quality and yield.

For those into the science of wine, here's a few vineyard topics on our minds this time of year:

Canopy Management

Managing vine canopy is a precarious balance between a range of factors - the right sunlight for grape quality, ripening rate, sunburn risk and disease are all quite important, and there's also water efficiency, ease of managing bird nets, and how pretty the vines look, to consider.

This year we are doing less manipulation than usual. We often remove excess shoots and pluck lots of leaves, but this year is dry and summer is forecast to be hot, so we're leaving a little more canopy for shade than usual, and will control any excess vigour through managing soil moisture.

"Our Shiraz uses a 'lazy ballerina' system"

Our Shiraz uses a 'lazy ballerina' system, where we use a series of wires to hold up the shoots, with the eastern side vertical but the western side angled out for more afternoon shade (hence the name, imagine a ballerina with one arm up and one lazy arm). Lazy Ballerina is great for airflow, balanced sun exposure and also looks quite nice! Some years we still need to pluck leaves in the Shiraz, but this year we think it looks perfect as is.

Soil Moisture

We've teched-up our operation this year, investing in bluetooth soil moisture monitoring. In years of drought like this, grape quality factors will suffer without watering in our vineyard, but it's a delicate balance, so soil moisture probes are a great way to accurately monitor what is happening under the soil (and give us pretty graphs to go 'ooh' at).

To grow the best quality grapes with reasonable yields, the vines need different soil moisture targets at different times. Before and during flowering (late spring), a nice moist soil is key in developing healthy bunches with good fruit set (lots of berries), and a solid canopy to provide the right shade and photosynthesis for ripening later in the season.

'A little stress can get quality results'

Once the berries have set, however, a little stress can get quality results in red varieties (known as deficit irrigation). Keeping the vines a little stressed results in multiple changes, with smaller berries one factor in a high skin to pulp ratio, the skin having a lot of the desirable wine characters we're looking for so the more the better. Deficit irrigation is also a good tool for making sure the vine doesn't concentrate on canopy growth, which wastes energy and water and can delay ripening.

Later again, after the berries change colour (known as veraison, which happens late Jan), studies have found no benefit from deficit irrigation, and there is a significant risk of yield loss in hot weather, so we prefer to reduce the stress on the vines during this phase, with minimal watering, only where required to sneak the soil moisture into a lower stress range. With our shiny new graphs, we can be much more precise in our irrigation scheduling - and save water, while maximising quality.

There's plenty of research by AWRI we love to get amongst and are happy to send links if you're interested in the detail.

The Two-Year Vine Cycle

A tricky detail about growing grapes is that unlike annual crops, vines have a 'memory' of the past conditions that lasts over multiple years. This means V'20 buds were developed last season, complete with a maximum number of bunches and berries already 'coded in'.

'Vines have a memory of the past'

This matters because it means that this year's 'best case' yield was already defined last season, in what was a really low yielding season. So even if everything went perfectly this season, we'd be starting off with a factor that needs to be accounted for in managing V'20. This also means that growers who have lost their crop this year due to frost will lose yield next year, but from a more positive perspective it means everything we do to look after the vines each season also benefits the next season.

This might be a little bit of detail for the punters at home, but fun to share.

Our 2019 Whites' Little Journey

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 00:35:46 GMT

Here's a bit of a story (with pictures!) of the journey of our 2019 whites

And the final products?

2019 'Hidden Valley' Riesling: The dry vintage conditions resulted in high natural acidity and a citrus zest typical of the region. Grapefruit and granny smith apple can also be found in abundance, creating a Riesling with length and complexity.
2019 'Our Little Secret' Sauvignon Blanc is fresh and vibrant with big tropical fruit character, we’ve come to love drinking this wine in the warm days we've been getting recently.

New Eden Valley reds are here!

Tue, 11 Jun 2019 04:16:15 GMT

Green returns to Eden Valley and we have some new wines!

After a big wait as we let these mature both on oak and in bottle we are finally ready and proud to be able to share out 2015 Old River Red Cabernet and Merlot.

Both wines are rich and fruity, owing a lot to the favourable weather our vines were blessed with in Eden Valley. A dry season, vintage 2015 featured a mild summer with one well-timed major rain event at veraison to refill the soil profile without diluting the fruit.

The Cabernet delivers subtle vanillas and cassis, maintaining some ﬂoral aromas and eucalypt inﬂuences. A generous 36 months of French oak has given plenty of time for this full bodied wine to soften and develop complexity.

The Merlot is intensely aromatic, with plenty of plum and berry with some spice and hints of coffee and chocolate. The mouthfeel is round and smooth with great length of palate, again showing plum, chocolate and coffee.

Both wines, as all of our wines are, were made by hand with care, from hand-plunging to basket pressing, and were made from start to finish here by the two of us (along with a few helpers on picking day).

Vintage all happened quick for us this year, from our Sauvvy Blanc to our Cabernet Sauvignon all coming off the vine in less than a month, which is a little bit unheard of in Eden Valley. Yields were very low in the reds, creating small and concentrated clusters while the whites are displaying excellent natural acidity and amazing citrus fruit characters. We are now seeing some of the darkest and richest wines we have had the pleasure of experiencing, with a heads up now that now that this vintages reds are going to be sparse, but if we can do them justice, magnificent!

Our whites and Rose are just about ready for bottling, so for those of you patiently hanging out for our Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc you should be able to try them at the cellar door from next month. Hopefully it is not just Helen (Scott's mum) who is excited by this ;)

Along with vintage and winemaking, we've been kept busy by feeding our sheep and alpacas while we waited for the recent rain! Our latest cria (baby alpaca) was born on Bec's birthday in April and is growing well. Check out the photo below.

We've also had a few events including a beautiful autumn wedding which was amazing and was a pleasure to be a part of. A potentially problematic event which didn't seem to faze the crowd was the unashamedly crashing by Alan the alpaca who jumped the fence and got in the amongst the 'first kiss' photos for a bit of bonus entertainment.

Below are a few photos from the last couple of months, including a happy snap of Bec and Xavy with after some great news of winning

"The Best Small Cellar Door In Eden Valley"

from Gourmet Wine Traveller, our old olive tree producing plenty of fruit this season, the cabernet filter cake from our last basket press for vintage, and a cheeky shot of our Border Collie, Bandit, because we can't help it.

Our New Eden Valley Wayward girl

Wed, 20 Feb 2019 03:23:22 GMT

Our little cottage has had an interesting history and for each release of our"Wayward Girl" label we ask a different artist to celebrate this history through their own rendition of this time and place.

In recognition of one hundred and sixty two years after our quaint little cellar door cottage, Rushlea Homestead, was built, we asked our friend and artist Amy Herman to design a label that portrays 'The Wayward Girls' of Rushlea Homestead. These girls were sent away from friends and family during their pregnancies, with the hooded girl in the artwork a portrayal of their concealment during this time.

Reminiscent of our last vintage, the wine is a careful blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot & Cabernet Franc from our Eden Valley Estate (pictured above). The grapes were hand-picked into small open fermenters, hand-plunged and basket pressed before being aged in French Oak Barrels to bring you a smooth and luscious arvo wine.

Vintage update; The extreme heat in January threw everyone a few challenges this season, though with our hottest temp 'only' getting to 43, there was plenty we could do to maintain a healthy vineyard. A few tricks include using asymmetrical canopy management to expose the berries to morning sun (known as "Lazy Ballerina") while protecting them from the harsh afternoon heat.

Straw undervine has also been handy to reduce the soil temperatures and hold in moisture, and although we haven't seen any sun or heat damage, the yields are going to be pretty low this year after poor weather earlier in the season resulted in low berry numbers and fruit set.

Nets are up and veraison has hit, marking the start of the (anxious) wait for ripening. We're expecting a late vintage this year - veraison was about 2 weeks late - which means we can sit back and relax a little longer before the rush of vintage!

A special project this year is a collaboration with the Eden Valley Hotel on a Federweisser, a semi-fermented sweet Riesling which we will release at a function at the Hotel in March - the wine is picked, bottled and drank all on one week so it's something pretty different!

Gold Leaf Reserve

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 13:30:00 GMT

We are excited to (finally) release our next Gold Leaf Reserve wines! The Gold Leaf is reserved for our absolute favourite barrels of wine, most being single barrel wines of only around 350 bottles.

We've anxiously been watching these from little berries to the bottle for over 4 years now, hoping to show off some examples of what Eden Valley really can do. For those visitors that have discussed these wines with us, you would know we've been excited about these for a long time and can't wait to share these with you. These are a little bit fancy, with all ticks that make an icon wine without the price tag.

The 2014 Eden Valley Cabernet had extended french oak ageing for almost four years, followed by six-months bottle ageing, to develop and soften the palate so it is perfect to drink now or put down.

The 2015 Eden Valley Merlot is delectable and rich, it was barrel aged for 30 months in french oak, then bottle aged for six months and is a cherry delight.

These two wines join our 2013 Gold Leaf Reserve Shiraz Viognier, which James Halliday gave 93 points and said

"The amount of work behind this wine is obvious, the mouthfeel very good, the flavours likewise."

James Halliday

The Cabernet and Merlot are brand new so we don't have any reviews yet but we're excited to see the results. Our friends and visitors to the cellar door in the past few weeks have been saying great things - I don't want to brag but recently visitors have been throwing around words like 'exceptional' and 'amazing' (okay that's possibly a brag, sorry, I'm just excited!).

A defining feature of our Gold Leaf Reserve wines is there isn't much of them, so don't miss out! Our Gold Leaf Members have already had their early release so there's now less than 300 bottles left, and you'll likely never see these wines on a retail shelf.

News from around the estate

We've just released our first Rosé, a 2018 Cabernet Franc Rosé that will almost certainly sell out before the end of summer. We made so few bottles that we've limited the wine to Cellar Door only, so the only way to drink it is by visiting and relaxing on the cottage front porch.

And speaking of wines selling out, a couple of fan-favourites have been popular recently and are off the shelf at the moment - we're out of Riesling, the Wayward Girl and Sauvignon Blanc. The way we run our winery means we don't guarantee we'll always have the same range, as we make wines to suit the seasons conditions, so it can be a good idea to grab a few extra of what you like! We do know we're bottling the next Wayward Girl soon, along with our new and little bit different, Vitality coffee & wine blend.

Other things that have been keeping us busy include making some fun custom order 187mL wines, our latest beer (a tropical pale ale in honour of the warmer summer weather!), wine blending and bottling, and developing our next chocolate recipes.

A few photos:

Bandit being a good wine dog at the cellar door.
Scott's been helping out installing some new sculptures in the main street which celebrate the history of Eden Valley. Make sure to check them out next time you visit!
Xavier having a heart-to-heart with one of our three month old lambs.
Bec and Xavier checking on the sheep.

A Basic Guide to Practical Wine Cellaring

Sat, 30 Jun 2018 14:30:00 GMT

Do you have your wine on a display rack in your lounge room?

If so, consider this a digital slap on your knuckles for the damage being done to your lovely wine collection. So why do you store it there… It looks nice and I understand we can't all add a basement wine cellar (the practicality of digging hole under the middle of your house quickly becomes a problem), but there are other options…

Firstly why are wine storage conditions so important? The first reason is that with time, under the right conditions, the components of the wine will work together to create balance between fruit, acid and tannins to soften and mature to a taste which many prefer. The second reason is to prevent our wine turning to the dreaded 'vinegar', the process where volatile compounds multiply and overpower the taste and smell of the wine.

What we try to achieve when storing our wine is to prevent exposure to sunlight (UV), avoid quick changes in temperature, as well as keeping the maximum temperature down. These conditions all favour the development of our wine spoilage mechanisms (Bec loves talking the chemistry, but I'll leave out the details for now). Our ideal temperature for slow ageing is 10-15 degrees C, keeping below a maximum of 25 degrees C. For those questioning 'What about humidity?' this is not as critical to our wine as the aforementioned factors and has thankfully become even less of a factor with the introduction of screwcap.

I hope you're convinced action is needed, SO WHAT DO YOU DO??

I named this 'practical' storage so I'll start at reducing the damage (not preventing it!) and I've mentioned our critical factors are sunlight, temperature variation and maximum temperature. So, if you like your wine on display in your living area, look to reduce damage by getting out of the line of sunlight, avoid places next to heating and cooling such as under ducts. Pretty simple hey?!

So we now want to get a little more serious, but what if you've got no spare cash (as you've spent it all on wine). Let's get it out of our living area that is exposed to sunlight and regular changes in temperature and find a better room. You're looking for the coolest room in the house, and as a typical Aussie house may not have a basement, look preferably for a south east facing room that avoid the heat of the evening sun. Now we want to black out the sun with decent curtains (or a black sheet) and we have an improvement. You could now consider getting the wines inside some additional insulation such as a cupboard with some covering blankets.

Your wines are now starting to feel safer and are on the road to ageing, with the maximum temperature of 25 potentially covered, but the ideal temperature of 10-15 for a safe, slow ageing process is far from a guarantee. This is where money and effort start to come into play. Money can get you wine fridge, which is a particularly neat and simple option, whereas effort (and potentially money) can get you the fun and idealistic underground wine cellar.

A small wine fridge start at around the $150 mark, but will often not have a compressor at this price, resulting in less ability to cool if put in a really hot room. $500 will get you a good quality 32 bottle wine fridge you can be confident will last and then price and options grow from there. These can be a great addition to a living space or can look quite appealing replacing one of the kitchen cupboards, just remember to watch sunlight if they're not tinted.

Ahh, the underground cellar. It has to be the pinnacle of wine storage options. Combine it with a secret 'James Bond' style entrance they can be very entertaining and add value to your home. However, in this case I am talking about practical options so in this area we are limited.
I have included a picture of a prefabricated wine cellar that stood out to me as something a little special, in which you can get quite a few options of typically concrete shells that can be placed in the ground and buried. Alternatively mates have used a buried shipping container or excavated into the side of a rise.

If it all sounds too hard, but you want a guarantee, there is a simple way, an off-premise wine storage facility. If you live within close proximity of a city there are plenty of options for you, but it ain't the most exciting way to look after your wine.

So you're now looking after your wine, now what?

Peak drinking depends so much on the wine, cellaring conditions and personal taste that it is not possible to have a general rule for all wine. I'll leave you with a quick tip that hopefully doesn't leave a sour taste… You decide what works for you and the best way to do that is with plenty of practice, which means you need to get out there and try many wines young and old.

Christmas Wine Pairings

Sun, 24 Dec 2017 13:30:00 GMT

The Christmas feast is just about our favourite thing about the festive season. Having emigrated from the UK, Bec's family celebrate Christmas with the traditional English feast of turkey, ham and deliciously crispy roast potatoes. Scott's big farming family add lots of modern Aussie BBQ and seafood to the mix, as well as Nan's famous stuffed potatoes and caramel tarts!

When planning your own family's big meal, don't forget to plan your wine pairings. A great wine match can bring the meal to another level, bringing out the best flavours in the food.

Warming Up

In our opinion, there's no better Aussie summer canape than delicious grilled Haloumi. We love the local producer, the Barossa Cheese Company and grill it with lemon juice and a dash of salt and pepper.

The salt and citrus flavours will pair perfectly with the crisp acidity of an Eden Valley or Clare Valley Riesling. Why not try yourself with our Eden Valley Riesling?

Seafood is light with delicate flavours, so need a light wine to balance. An unoaked Chardonnay will be a good pairing for prawns, and we've found (by lots of personal experience!) that Riesling is perfect with atlantic salmon.

And while some may think you can't make friends with salad, matching it with a fresh, tangy Sauvignon Blanc will be assured to win over the carnivorous types!

Barbequed Delights

When pairing wine with barbeque food, it's all about the intensity of the cooking. For a big, charred and smoky barbeque, the wine needs to be equally big and bold to match - a light wine could taste insipid next to strong barbeque flavours. A full bodied Shiraz or Cab Sauv from a warm climate like Barossa or McLaren Vale will be your best bet.

When cooking a bit lighter and softer, the same should go for the wine. A cool/mild climate red from Eden Valley will match most cuts, but for really lean meat, you may want to go a cooler climate with an Adelaide Hills wine.

The Main Event

A good rule of thumb with meats is that higher fat content suit wines with a higher tannin content.

For turkey, which is quite lean, a wine with lower tannins will match well. Full flavoured whites such as chardonnay will have the right acid balance to match well, or else for reds, an aged Merlot or Cabernet blend will work, as they tend to have lower tannin concentration than the bigger Cabernets and Shiraz, and ageing polymerises tannins, causing them to soften, and won't over-power the lean turkey.

For other roast meats, consider the cut - a lean cut will suit the same reds as turkey, but a more oily cut will suit a Cabernet Sauvignon.

All about the Wayward girls who lived in our Eden Valley Cellar Door before we did...

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 13:30:00 GMT

Our quaint little cellar door has an interesting history. The original homestead of Eden Valley, the cottage was build 160 years ago in 1856. While it has many tales to tell, one that stuck with us was the story of the Wayward Girls.

In the early 1900s the cottage became a home for 'Wayward' city girls. These girls were sent away from friends and family in Adelaide to spare their families the 'shame' of unmarried pregnancy. We have so much sympathy for these girls who, already going through a hard time, were sent to the back of beyond, before having to give up their newborns.

Later in the 20th century the cottage fell to ruins, before Bryce and Bronnie spent years faithfully restoring the rubble back to its former glory. We're now so lucky to be able to share this little historical gem with our customers as Fernfield's cellar door.

The Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc were grown in our little vineyard behind the winery on our property.

We have put a lot of work into getting the right soil nutrients through comprehensive soil testing and nutrient additions such as organic compost and straw, so that we can be sure our grapes of the best quality they can possibly be.

To get the optimal ripening conditions, we use canopy management including manual shoot thinning and topping.

The grapes were all picked by hand, with the Merlot coming off in April and Cabernet Sauvignon and Franc hanging on late and developing on vine until just into May 2014. Bec and I called in the help of family and friends, but don't worry, we paid them well for their work with a BBQ lunch. Going back through the photos I've just noticed we made them cook it too...

Each of the components of the blend were fermented separately, with hand plunging around the clock to extract colour and flavours. After at least 7 days on skins we basket pressed and aged the wine on oak for just over 24 months.

The resulting wine is a careful blend of Cabernet Sauvignon (51%), Merlot (43%) and Cabernet Franc (6%) to produce a wine of finesse and elegance.

For the 160 year celebration of the cottage, we wanted to develop some special artwork to honour the wayward girls.

Meet Patrick Cunningham, a great artist and friend who kindly agreed to make the label. Pat toiled away using a range of mediums to get some great effects and give life to the faceless and nameless girls who faced such hard times in Rushlea cottage almost 100 years ago.

And here's the final result!

The 2014 Wayward Girl is our most elegant and lightest red, with tannin structure to age, but ready to drink now and featuring a fruity nose of plum, cherry and earthy clove .

Chocolate & Wine

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 13:30:00 GMT

Why pair wine and chocolate you ask? Because it's CHOCOLATE & WINE!

It's something we have been tinkering with for quite some time, with things getting a little more serious just after a chocolate and wine pairing session held at the National Wine Centre in conjunction with Haigh's Chocolate.

Here some great wines and amazing chocolate were paired and put to the test. For us the results included some great pairings with big reds and sweet wines, but there was some trouble for the light and medium bodied dry wines. A general rule is to avoid having the chocolate sweeter than the wine as sweetness highlights harsh astringency in the wine, but here lies the problem... Dark chocolate is generally the only chocolate with suitably low sugar, however dark chocolate's powerful flavours outstrip light and medium body dry wines. For us this was a call for something different, "Challenge Accepted"!

Where to start making our own chocolate? Here some nerdy engineering came into play with the fun of researching the equipment required to make fine chocolate. We quickly realised that a big factor is the type of cacao bean that is used. With our goal being to increase the amount of cacao and reduce the sugar to match dry wine, the rare Criollo bean is particularly suited providing a very low bitterness on a typically "dark chocolate" ratio. Considering the cost, this bean is rarely used exclusively without a blend, but we want the best pairing we can make!

A number of other different methods have gone into our chocolate making such as a process called 'long conching', which is essentially finely grinding the cacao for a long period of time to form a smooth and velvety texture. We quickly realised that supermarket ingredients were not going to cut it and teamed up with Maretai Organics and Inspired Ingredients to get us started. Here comes the fun part, testing and tasting, right? Umm, no, no it doesn't, here comes seized chocolatey messes and a lesson, chocolate is a temperamental little pest.

We soon found that some more learning, experimentation and precision was required. A few learnings; reducing sugar increases the viscosity and makes things hard to work with, you can't let in ANY moisture from steam or ingredients (no Cadbury doesn't pour milk into their chocolate like on tv) and tempering requires precise control and a feel for what the chocolate is doing.

Here's a short pictorial to take you through;

Our chocolate making process... (Hover over the pictures!)

Thanks to Maretai for the raw ingredient photos!

One of the finished products:

Ok, experiments are done and lessons learnt, now for the testing and tasting! We have tried A LOT of fun and different ingredients, combinations and chocolate recipes. Some pairings brilliantly highlighted something in the wine or chocolate and some completely stripped the other one of anything enjoyable. We have found in general the sugar we ended up with is significantly lower than a standard chocolate, which means it's much healthier ... except for the extra cacao that we use instead, but let's not worry about that :)

So far the feedback we are getting is encouraging, with most people finding highlighted flavours when using the suggested pairings.

Your turn! We have created a chocolate and wine pairing experience for you at our cellar door and are keen for your thoughts on our pairings. We are planning and testing pairings for future vintages and may have some experiments at the cellar door where you can help us pick the best match.