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We harvest around 800 tonnes of fruit each year – and it all ripens during the same short few months each year. This frantic time of 24/7 operations, stress, sleep deprivation, early morning trips to the Granite Belt vineyards, unseasonal weather dramas, and general ordered chaos, is a time wine makers call “vintage.”
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| Our 12 full-time staff are joined by a casual roster of 60 workers brought in to hand-pick specific vintages that the mechanical pickers aren’t able to handle. Vineyard laboratories pinpoint the moment the grapes are the their peak and most harvesting takes place under the forgiving shade of night skies. Over a ten week period, around 800 tonnes of red and white grapes are plucked from the their home and sent via overnight refrigerated lorry to our winery.
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| At it’s peak, 2-3 semi truckloads of grapes are crushed daily, their stems removed and the juices then stored in refrigerated tanks where yeasts and sugars begin the time honoured process of creating wine. We won’t bore you with all the tech stuff (take one of our winery tours to get all the detail) but from here it gets fined, cellared and carefully monitored all the way through the process until our wine makers decide it’s ready for bottling.
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| Our own bottling plant takes the finished wine and puts it into familiar shaped bottles with screw caps (never buy a corked wine!) and labels added, then into cartons ready for distribution. This happens close to one million times each year – the number of bottles we make (and not including the wines we bottle, label and carton for other wine companies!)
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