Redwood Pass Vineyards is aimed predominately to supply quality fruit. Firstly to our family based wine company label, Blind River, and secondly to contract make unfinished wine to take advantage of this wine market with a quality product. The balance of supply v demand is now leaning towards the fruit supply being plentiful and a consequential slipping of the quality unfinished wine market. We are therefore changing our mix of supply to that of quality fruit only. That is now being produced under contract to our neighbours Vavasour wines and to our family wine labels of Blind River and The Sisters
Viticultural practices are formulated with high fruit quality as the ultimate aim. We have learnt with our clones that flavour is the dominant maturity parameter and that harvesting is scheduled with that in mind. Cropping levels are also closely controlled with shoot thinning of our Sauvignon Blanc across the whole vineyard rather than selected parts as has been the case in the past. Fruit is being dropped as an additional method of quality control.
We invested in a top of the line Pellenc grape harvester in 2003 which picks into bins on the machine as opposed to the more usual practice of a conveyor discharging into a tractor towed gondola. The machine being made in France was named “Rainbow Warrior” as a bit of a “piss take” but all the same a succinct message from down under. Sauvignon Blanc is harvested by machine and our Pinot Noir is hand picked. This machine being multi function is now used for canopy triming and leaf removal with the appropriate attachments having been purchased to carry out these functions.
We have synergies with our neighbour Vavasour Wines who also make our wine under contract. Wine maker Stu Marfell works closely with the vineyard to maximize fruit quality. We harvest all the Vavasour winery vineyard estate that is machine harvested and several of the Vavasour growers nearby.
21 hectares of a nearby property is being developed as part of the family business and was planted September 2007 to varieties of Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir. The mix is 2 ha of Pinot Noir with the rest Sauvignon Blanc. The first crop, vintage 2009, produced high quality fruit with some interesting flavours. More info here: www.wainui.net
Vintage 2009. In addition to early shoot thinning this is an example of crop thinning of our Pinot Noir aimed at dropping less mature and overly large bunches. About 50% of the fruit was dropped to the ground.
