This week is mostly about ferments finishing & getting the parcels of wine into their barrels. Which means hours of repetitive work - and concentration - you don’t want to overfill the barrels, the floor doesn’t appreciate fine wine like we do! Phillip from Cellar Door is getting into the thick of things today - as he has been every Wednesday during vintage. I’ll pass over to Phillip here to explain the lab happenings… During my tenure in the laboratory of Turkey Flat Vineyards this vintage my tasks start with looking at the maturity of grape samples from our vineyards and running a test on their respective Baume (specific gravity), pH and TA (Total acidity) developments week by week. Each bag will contain a sporadic selection of bunches from the vineyard to gain a cross section of fruit that when crushed will display a fair result for the vineyard as a whole. This indicators help Mark to ascertain the development in our vineyards and highlight the best times to be picking fruit at their optimum ripeness.

At this time of vintage, with intake slowing down our focus can be turned to other important areas in the winery. Alex practices his amateur coopering skills today - fixing leaky barrels. It’s a pretty important job - since losing vast quantities of wine to either the drain or spoilage is NOT what you want to happen to all your hard work! It’s still all about caring for what we have here this week… Pumping over, cleaning… watching… waiting… It’d be a fair assumption that the darts board has been seeing a little more use over the last couple of days!

All systems are go for the release of the new vintages - the morning starts with button pushing and all the fun things before the orders start coming in thick & fast. 2013 Shiraz, 2013 Grenache & 2014 Mataro are now officially on the shelves & ready for sale! Amongst all this fun & excitement we have John from our UK distributor, Mentzendorff here for a visit. John gets treated to a real look at the life of Turkey Flat - including (the much anticipated) left-overs of MorningTeaByJo & the Quiz. We also give our kitchen a run ourselves & prepare a delicious Barossa platter-style lunch to enjoy (ok, the only thing that went in the oven were the walnuts for the salad - but we put the benches & the sink to good use!). I must also apologise to all who I inadvertently confused by posting a picture of this platter - this was just a special staff lunch, not something we’re offering to our guests. Sorry for the tease, folks! Ohhhh - what’s this? A new load of grapes hits the winery - this time from a cooler block of Shiraz which needs just that little bit longer to ripen. Adding Shiraz from cooler blocks to that of warmer blocks adds a nice touch of elegance to the final blend.

It’s all about the sweeties today - with late-picked Marsanne for The Last Straw and Pedro Ximènez coming in from our blocks in Stonewell and Bethany respectively. In fact, the majority of the Pedro has just a few hundred metres to travel to the winery, I could probably kick a footy into the vineyard from my desk (if there wasn’t a wall in the way of course…and if I could actually kick a footy - but you get what I mean!) It’s hard not to appreciate just how lucky we are to be surrounded by such functional beauty all the time. More Shiraz? What is this? April Fools?! No, no fools. A tiny little parcel of Shiraz from a cooler climate completes our Vintage 2015 intake. It may be small, but it’s those tiny parcels from the dedicated growers that can make all the difference in a blend.