Winter 2008
Dear Friends,
We have just completed the 2008 vintage and come through a record-breaking heat wave. Thankfully most of our grapes were safely in the winery before the 16 days over 38 degrees was upon us. Fortunately we grow mainly hardy Rhone varieties that are well suited to this kind of heat and we are confident that the 2008 wines will be well-structured and long lived. After an association of nearly ten years our national distributor, Wine Source, closed its doors in September 2007. We have since appointed Angove’s as our distribution partner, and look forward to working closely with this long-established, family-owned company. Christie and I have planned visits to each state to coincide with the launch of our new release wines and have organised wine dinners in SA, VIC, QLD and NSW. Details of the dinners are listed under the events section of this newsletter and we look forward to meeting those of you who are able to join us.
We have had several happy events within the Turkey Flat family this year, on the 3rd of September our Cellar Manager Peter Mernagh and his partner Elli Beer gave birth to a healthy baby boy named Ben.
We are also delighted to report that on the 10th of November 2007, our winemaker Jules Campbell married Cameron Ashmead. Cameron and his family own and operate Elderton Wines. We wish them all the best for their future together.
Our new Finance Manager Kate Neldner has been bitten by the Triathlon bug, and persuaded us to enter a team in the annual BRW event in Adelaide. Kate swam, I (Peter) rode and Jules ran. We came a creditable 39 out of 65 and I have told the rest of the staff that next year we will enter two teams…so training starts now! A new staff member joined the team in December last year when we
appointed Teresa Auricht to assist us in Administration and Cellar Door Sales. Teresa has been working in sales for Bethany Wines for the past four years. She has a Wine Marketing degree graduating from the University of Adelaide in 2006. This year’s newsletter includes a map of our company’s five vineyards. These vineyards are spread over a radius of 20kmfrom Bethany in the south, Ebenezer in the north, Stonewell in the west, with other vineyards in the east. They cover four very different sub-regions and give us the ability to blend the attributes of each subregion into our wines.
We have put aside a barrel of 2008 Shiraz from each of these single vineyards Bethany, Ebenezer, and Stonewell with the view to releasing these small offerings in 2010 to highlight the distinctive subregions of the Barossa. To a large degree our winemaking begins in the vineyard - we spend a great deal of time managing vine vigour, controlling shoot growth as well as shoot and bunch thinning. This helps to reduce yields and open up the vines to let in the sunlight. We are also spending a lot more time trying to understand when the grapes are mature. We are not industrial winemakers and try at all times to keep the winemaking process simple and traditional, to not interfere with the true expression of the vineyard. We avoid the addition of tannin, instead using techniques such as cold soaking and extended maceration to extract optimum colour and natural tannin. Our oak handling is judicious and we restrain the use of new oak to allow the flavour of the grapes to dominate, carefully supported by fine French oak.
These philosophies are the foundation of our winemaking style and ensure that you can be confident of the quality and consistency of any wine bearing the Turkey Flat label. Once again we are proud to be able to offer you our new release of individually hand-crafted wines.
Cheers!
Peter & Christie Schulz