Our Director of Winegrowing, Patrick Materman, takes a look back at the highs and lows of Harvest 2023.
Marlborough
Despite early season weather concerns, Marlborough has had a superb vintage across all varieties with superb quality and yields being above the long-term average. The fruit remained clean with vibrant flavours and the resulting wines are looking outstanding. With high soil moisture levels leading into the season from heavy winter rain events, the vines got off to a good start with strong canopy growth setting up a strong ‘solar panel’ to ripen the crop. Temperatures hovered just over the long-term average; cool enough to extend the growing season and develop great depth of flavour and bright natural acidity in the fruit. With more elongated, looser grape bunches, there was very little berry squeeze, which coupled with dry weather from veraison through to harvest, resulted in low disease pressure.
Season Standouts
The Awatere Valley vineyards have been a real highlight this season, the wines showing amazing aroma and flavour intensity. It has also been a great vintage for Pinot Noir, the wines primary in colour, and carrying a purity of fruit character along with fine tannin structure. The Pinot Gris has also really shone this year.
Hawke’s Bay & Gisborne
Cooler conditions and unprecedented rainfall through the growing season, along with the effects of Cyclone Gabrielle have been particularly challenging and required vigilant vineyard management. Unfortunately, some vineyard blocks were not able to be harvested but despite these challenges, our significant vineyard holdings in the Gimblett Gravels region performed well; their free-draining soils providing the vines with more resilience to weather events. For both Hawke's Bay and Gisborne, whilst the season has not delivered to the high-quality standards required for our top tier wines, and these won’t be made; there are plenty of clean, fruit driven components to compile our main blends. It will be a vintage of elegance rather than power, where great vineyard sites, along with a highly experienced winegrowing team have delivered an amazing result given the challenges of the season.
Season Standouts
The late ripening reds from the Gimblett Gravels such as Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Grenache are some of the highlights. Thicker skins, lower cropping levels, and some settled late season weather saw these grapes picked close to optimal ripeness and in good condition. These wines currently display good colour and flavour concentration and are a step up in quality over 2022. Later ripening sites for Chardonnay delivered our best results, and a particular stand-out was our first harvest of Sauvignon Blanc from Springhill, a new vineyard well inland in Central Hawke's Bay. The resulting wine shows huge promise for this new grape growing subregion.
Above: A selection of the awesome entries into this year’s photo competition!
