Dry Grown
We don’t irrigate our vines. While establishing the vineyard, for the first three years, we hand water each vine individually. From the fourth year, the vines are on their own. Our philosophy behind being dry grown is to allow the grapes to develop an intensity of flavour, and to have the vines work with our soil and our site to allow them to best express the very place in which they grow.
From about the second or third year, we remove all the flower clusters before they set fruit because we need to focus the vines’ growth on their root systems, to give the vines the necessary resources to set them up to best carry their first and future crops.
In the case of our Sangiovese, we harvested the first crop in the vines’ sixth year from planting.
Even with this nurturing approach, we plan to continue to remove fifty percent of the potential crop each year to enable the remaining fruit to mature to the quality we expect to harvest.
Sustainably farmed
We manage the vineyard using organic and biodynamic inputs, many of them produced on site. We use no synthetic fungicides, herbicides, pesticides or fertilisers. Our fertilising regime consists of the application of annual composting, rock dust and on-farm fermented teas such as seaweed, casuarina, nettle and liquid manure.
As part of our fungicide control we use whey, sourced from a local organic goat dairy.
The posts used for the vineyard trellis are made from recycled plastic.
On our property we have planted over 2000 native trees and shrubs as part of our efforts to offset our carbon footprint.
By hand
Each of our vines gets touched by our hands multiple times over a season through pruning, shoot thinning, bunch thinning and finally harvesting.
Our weeding regime involves weed hoeing and hand weeding each individual vine. Also, each season, we usually do two complete passes through the vineyard with a brush cutter.
Each vine is hand mulched with straw.