"This was an interesting year as it's been so dry and hot, but the nights have been cool. We finished picking our McLaren Vale blocks a week ago. Our harvest volume was way down as many of the vineyards we work with are dry farmed—they only receive water from the sky, not the tap. In dryer years, the berries are smaller creating a higher skin-to-juice ratio per berry. This means that the wines fermented on-skins can get pretty intense. Some producers love this, but I'm always looking for freshness and infusion rather than extraction in the wines.  To mediate the potential of producing absolutely gigantic, gobstopper style wines, I pressed some of the red grapes straight off their skins and put this back over the other berries that were not juiced for a smaller skin-to-juice ratio.

On a high note, this week we picked the very first crop from our home vineyard in Lenswood, where we live and where we will open our own cellar door later this year. We began planting 5 years ago. This year we harvested Chenin Blanc, Savagnin, Cab Franc/Traminer blend and Gewurztraminer. All these micro-ferments are happily bubbling away and we are very excited to see how the vinous story of this land we have the honor of caring for unfolds."

"We have a fantastic intern from Greece this year, Giorgos.  He has four natural wine harvests under his belt. His last home was the Jura in France where he worked with a fantastic natural wine producer. One of the friends he made in the region was an intern with Jauma in 2015, so I was super excited to have a recommendation for an intern from an intern from 10 years ago!

Ferments have behaved themselves pretty well. Most of the wines are fermenting happily and just two Grenache vineyards are still infusing on their skins."

"Got to be honest, I would have planted our whole farm to Savagnin, but Sophie (which means wise in Greek) suggested this might not be the smartest idea as would it not be nice to be able to showcase a range of wines at our future cellar door rather than just one wine? She is right, of course, but harvesting the first Savagnin grapes was very exciting. This block is named after my mother Mary Lou who contributed both financially and with kindness and great-grandparenting to our farm which she visits regularly.

I'm excited about all the new wines on the farm but this year also has been a massive shift in the varieties we are working with. I have worked with the Wood family (Ralph, the father and Fiona, the daughter) vineyard in Clarendon for 16 years now! This block is the backbone of what Jauma is. Fiona suggested a few years ago that she would like to graft some of the Shiraz at her Dad's block to some other varieties. We decided to keep a third of the beautiful dry farmed Shiraz (think Tikka) and graft the remainder over to Grenache Blanc, Sciacarello and Muscat Petit Grain, so this year we have had the delight of exploring these new varieties from a block we know so well...just you wait friends!"