Winemaker's Series: Voyager Estate

Continuing our series of harvest reports from the new world comes news from the Margaret River. Steve James is the Goliath beating winemaker at Voyager Estate and has this on their 2010 harvest.

"Thursday 18th February

Our 2010 harvest will commence tomorrow morning with the first of our Chardonnay blocks. This is our Voyager Block 10 which is planted to Clone 95 Chardonnay and is traditionally our first harvest.

The Margaret River region is currently experiencing magnificent ripening conditions with warm temperatures averaging around 26 degrees Celsius, mild nights and no rainfall.
The early signs are very exciting with outstanding early flavour development and the Chardonnay is showing that lovely tight grapefruit and dried pear flavours we look for at low Baume's and with perfect levels of natural acidity.

Sauvignon Blanc is also developing flavour with great intensity and I expect we will begin harvesting this mid to late next week. Very happy at this stage and keeping our fingers crossed that this perfect weather continues...."

Winemaker's Series: The new world harvest

At this time of year, whilst the Northern hemisphere's vines sit dormant, enjoying their time off, in peaceful reflection prior to the verdant onset of spring, the action is all a-happening south of the equator. This is business time, a hive of activity, for the vast majority of our new world producers will be bringing in grapes right about now.

The first of our contributions comes from the highly talented Morne Vrey, winemaker at Delaire in South Africa's Stellenbosch. They have begun bringing in their Sauvignon Blanc already, a wine recently voted the number two example of its type in South Africa.

"Harvest started about a week ago. Our Sauvignon Blanc vineyards were revealing interesting ripe flavours, earlier than expected. Consequently we rushed to harvest the grapes that we source from the Stellenbosch region. Our Chardonnay too has been picked and is now in barrel, fermenting away.

Into our second week, things have slowed down due to some unseasonal rainy weather and the cool start to February which slowed the ripening of certain varietals. However we are awaiting a delivery of Sauvignon Blanc from the Walker Bay area later today-hopefully this will get the momentum up again."

David and Goliath...

Well not exactly.Voyager Estate's Shiraz 2007 didn't find itself pitted, one on one, slingshot in hand directly against the iconic Penfolds Grange, but it might as well have been. There has been much publicised in Australia about the little WA Shiraz that has scored higher than the most recent release of Australias "First Shiraz" the first growth priced Grange, but little over here.

The scores come from the highly respected Penguin 2010 Good Australian Wine Guide and see Voyager's 2007 Shiraz gleaning 96 points while 2004 Grange picks up 94. There has been such a clamour for it down under that it's no longer available from any merchant or the Voyager cellar door.

Fortuntately our shipment arrived today, and guess what, at £65 per six bottles ib, we won't be giving any back.