Author: Gareth

Second wine: 2009 syrah & pinot to be bottled soon

/ Gareth

Stunning, that’s what Nicholas said. The winemaker, that is, about our first syrah. Quite made my day, I can tell you. I tasted a barrel sample today, and I have to say I thought it was pretty good — though naturally I’m biased. The pinot’s not bad either: a lot more colour and complexity than last year’s first effort. We’ll be bottling both wines in about a month — we should have about 25 cases of pinot and 12 of syrah. Some may be available for sale, but I’ve no idea of prices yet.

The 2010 grapes are looking good under their nets. It’s a been a warm, dry summer so far, and I’m expecting a slightly bigger crop than last year, but with good concentration. Now that we’re moving into late summer and early autumn, all we need is some of those long dry weeks Waipara’s famous for…

Christmas, wishes

/ Gareth / 2 Comments

Boxing Day, and hangdog shame strikes. No updates to On The Farm since April. Plenty of effort at the other place, but naught here since the pinot harvest (which went well, thanks to help from friends). We have a barrel of pinot and a half barrel of syrah to bottle in a couple of months time. Nick the winemaker, pushed by me to give me some idea of the quality of the wine, said that if it had come from his vineyard he’d be pleased. So… we wait. Might have some to sell.

Bad year for truffles. Nothing at Limestone Hills or our neighbours in Waikari — a poor season in Canterbury generally, brought on (my theory) by a marked drop in temperature in mid-February. Add to that an early start to winter (I picked the syrah in May, with snow on the grapes), and I think there just wasn’t enough heat over late summer and autumn to get the truffles going. Fingers firmly crossed for this year.

And so, as we drift towards a new year, there is (as usual) a lot for me to do on the farm, cleaning up the trees and getting the irrigation system primed for any dry spell, plus shoot thinning and sulphur spraying in the vineyard. I’ll be on RNZ National’s Summer Report (morning news show) at 7-50am on New Years Day, talking truffles, and I’ll be duty Sciblogger on Noelle McCarthy’s morning show at about 10-30am on Jan 6th. Then there’s the new book. I need to spend more time writing it. Finishing it. Publishing it. If all goes to plan (ha!), then I’ll post a draft of the introduction and first chapter here before the end of January. But don’t hold your collective breath…

And, before I forget, nadolig llawen!

King harvest (has surely come)

/ Gareth

Pinot harvested today, thanks to the good offices of friends, family, an Italian student winemaker and an itinerant American drummer. Two big barrels full, so we should do better than last year, but I’ll know the numbers in a day or so when the grapes have been crushed. Meanwhile, the syrah sits in the vines, waiting another week or two. Is there enough for a half barrel? Dunno…

winelabe1.jpg

Meanwhile, here’s the finished label for our first pinot, still to be printed, but we have 150 bottles waiting for them. As this wine will not be sold, the label doesn’t have the usual paraphenalia — 13.5% alcohol, etc — but they might be added to the 2009 label. At the moment, the 2008 is still too new in the bottles to be really drinkable: I ought to leave it alone for a few months, but it will be difficult to resist…

Time of the season

/ Gareth

I ride the farm bike (four wheels, a buggered exhaust so it roars rather than purrs) round the vineyard several times a day at the moment, in the hope that this will deter voracious avian thieves from feasting on my crop. Last year, they reduced a tonne to 300kg, but this year (fingers duly crossed) a number of large vineyards down the valley seem to be intent on providing fodder, and so the flocks of starlings and waxeyes haven’t yet come this far upstream. And if they do, I have a shotgun waiting. To scare them, of course, though four and twenty blackbirds might very well make a nice pie. A lot of feathers to pluck, though. We have also acquired a pheasant in the vineyard to go with the quail that parade across our lawn. I haven’t got the heart to shoot either…

Grape news: We plan to bottle The Faultline’s first vintage this weekend, and harvest the next the following week. The pinot will be first, with the syrah a week or ten days later. Meanwhile, Peg’s nose is going to start hunting for Burgundy truffles, and I will be checking for saffron milk caps at regular intervals (none yet – but we have had some very nice birch boletes from my father-in-law’s lawn and a giant puffball from a grassy bank in Rangiora).

Book news: Hot Topic has made the shortlist for the Royal Society of New Zealand’s first Science Book Prize. Richard Dawkins will announce the winner at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival on May 15th. I have many minor appendages crossed.

Guilt, and Google

/ Gareth

The guilt part is that the other place has been taking up all my blogging, and OTF has suffered. So here’s a quick update, stimulated by yesterday’s gadget acquisition. I was fiddling around in Google Maps, and there — lo and behold — it appears that Google’s Street View is already available for Ram Paddock Road. It’s not that long since Street View was announced over here, and I had assumed it was mainly a thing of the cities and towns, but it appears they’ve been thorough. You can look over the garden fence and see the pond, admire the big gum, and — here’s a surprise — see nets on the vines. The Google bus must have driven past about a year ago, because we haven’t got the nets on yet (it’ll be a couple of weeks, at least). Feel free to be nosey.

Meanwhile, we’ve been having another hot La Niña summer. Our unheated pool has been up to 30C, and the air a good deal warmer. Irrigation is being used to the full. The grapes are looking good, the truffière’s being watered, and once again I bless the decision (made a decade ago) to buy a large fridge that dispenses ice and chilled water out of the freezer door.

And finally, because new gadgets are fun, if you visit OTF from an iPhone, you will be greeted by a special phone-friendly theme, courtesy of the excellent wptouch plugin.

First wine: The Faultline Pinot Noir in the barrel

/ Gareth / 1 Comment

Friday was a big day. I took some friends of ours up to the Daniel Schuster winery (well worth a visit by anyone passing through Waipara), and we were able to taste a barrel sample of Limestone Hills’ first wine (thanks Tom and Marie). A big moment. Nervous, moi? A little, perhaps, so don’t expect analytical tasting notes. After six months in the barrel (there’s only one), it’s a very pleasing tipple. Elegant, I’d say, with a good complex nose. Delicate, not a big, dark blockbuster. I’m biased, of course, but it’s a wine I’ll be very happy to drink on a regular basis. Should be bottled before next year’s harvest, and we’ll have 11 or 12 cases to put in the shed that passes for a cellar. I don’t plan to sell any, but bottles will be available for friends and anyone dining with us will probably get more of it than they really want. I’ll have more detailed tasting notes after bottling.

The name’s based on the geology of the vineyard. A large active fault cuts across it, dividing the solid limestone that underlies the farmhouse and cottage from the more rubbly, but still lime-rich subsoil beneath the main truffiere. I have all summer to design a label…

More than I can eat…

/ Gareth / 3 Comments

I promised a final tally for our truffle season. It’s taken me far too long to post, but I can report that we produced 228g this year, off just one tree. If we could match that yield across the whole truffiere, we’d be doing rather well… We didn’t sell any, but a couple of guests staying at The Shearer’s Cottage had a successful truffle hunt, and a few friends got some to taste. For a while, I even had more than I could eat – certainly more than Camille wanted to eat!

Spring has now sprung, and the rituals of mowing and weeding are being followed. Irrigation is ready to go, sun is shining, and we’ve got a few ideas to try to see if we can persuade a few more trees to get busy. We’ll be planting another 50 trees, playing around with the soil, and even transplanting a core of soil from the productive tree to another to see if that has any effect. Fingers crossed.

Tasmanian times

/ Gareth / 1 Comment

I’ve just received copies of the issue of Food & Wine that includes my article about Tasmania. Looks good on the page, I have to say. I could do with a few more gigs like that, but my waistline might disagree. Web version of the article is here. Meanwhile, on the farm, I’m struggling to catch up with pruning and mowing because spring has sprung with a real vengeance. A roundup of the truffle season will follow fairly soon.

Truffle media roundup

/ Gareth / 1 Comment

It’s been a warm, wet summer in Britain and that’s brought another bumper crop of summer truffles. Back at the beginning of the month The Guardian consulted Truffles UK boss Nigel Haddon-Paton:

“It’s a really exciting year,” said Haddon-Paton. “Like most crops, truffles need water and warmth and that’s what we’ve had this summer. There are lots of truffles and we have found them up to 500g each – bigger than cricket balls. We had a look at some three weeks ago, but they weren’t right. They had grown slowly because of the spring cold. However, since then we have had lots of rain, which has helped them grow, and it has also been humid, so they are doing very well.”

More from The Times, Telegraph, Independent and the BBC, who reported on a find of ten summer truffles in a Plymouth garden. There’s a little video snippet on that page that’s worth watching, if only for the reporter’s halting attempts to use a few truffle cliches. Britain’s first truffle dog championship was also held earlier this month near Basingstoke in Hampshire. The winner was Bramble, a black labrador owned by James Fever from Wiltshire, the Basingstoke Gazette reports.

Meanwhile, in Australia, another good season is approaching its end, as The Age discovers.

According to president of the Australian Truffle Growers’ Association, Wayne Haslam, Australia’s 150 truffle growers are expected to harvest 1 1/2 to two?tonnes of truffles this year. Official figures say half of those will come from WA, a quarter from northern Tasmania and the remainder from Ballarat, the Yarra Valley and Gippsland in Victoria; and Canberra, Bathurst and Orange in NSW. However, many growers say the figures don’t add up and are secretive about their yields – this is a product worth up to $3000 a kilogram, after all. At its annual general meeting last month, the association predicted that Australian truffle production would approach 10 tonnes by 2013. Perfect timing, with export markets opening up around the world as French truffle production rates plummet and Australian growers develop a reputation for quality.

There’s nothing like confidence – and the truffles to back it up. If you’d like to see pictures of at least one of the people quoted therein (hi Wayne!), visit Aussie magazine Regional Food, and view their nifty photo essay on truffles in Australia and Umbria.

(If paradise is) half as nice

/ Gareth

One down, one to go. The southern hemisphere’s first successful commercial grower of bianchetto (Tuber borchii) truffles, Jeff Weston* of the Borchii Park truffiere outside Christchurch, was kind enough to send me a couple of lovely truffles (see last post), and this evening we ate the first of them. It was a simple risotto milanese, with the addition of a few peas, and a scrape of nutmeg. And a whole truffle (about 15g). Truffle burps? We got ’em.

I’d hate to have to compare the bianchetto to a good magnatum – it’s been too long since I tasted a really good example – but I was forcefully reminded of the best of the Oregon whites I tasted last year. The aroma is penetrating. Despite being in a box inside a plastic envelope, Peg knew something was up as I walked past on the way back from the post box. Her nose was twitching… As indeed was mine.

Number two is with some eggs. Meanwhile there’s a ripe Camembert infusing with some black truffle.

Will I be able to grow more than I can eat? I’m hoping for a good crop, or the belt tightening will be metaphorical rather than actual…

* A scholar and a gentleman