Hawke’s Bay White Grape Harvest 2012

For the southern hemisphere vintage I approached a number of wineries in South Africa, Australia, Argentina and Chile, and was happy to get a response from Delegat’s, Oyster Bay in New Zealand. I applied for their vintage Cellar hand position at their Hawks Bay winery. After a tough phone interview, I was offered the position starting work on the 20^th February 2012.

After a long (36 hours) flight from London via Tokyo to Napier on the North Island of New Zealand, I got to Hawks Bay, where I started work.

Harvest this year has been the wettest in 20 years particularly in Hawks Bay.  Not a great start!!!

Eventually the weather turned onto our side. Harvest began with a vintage crew of 9, from all over the world including California, France, UK Italy and Spain.  As harvest was underway we where allocated our harvest positions by Sam Brondel, cellar master/winemaker at Delegat’s.  I was given day shift, so pleased!! My duty was running the Crush Pad, which consisted of a 25 tonne-tipping bin, Destemmer, Crusher and a Must Pump. As harvest was under way, all 1800 tones primarily consisting of Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio and a little bit of Sauvignon Blanc arrived from Delegat's largest vineyard, Crownthorpe. (320ha)

The grapes would arrive and be processed through the crush pad and start the press cycle. Once the press cycle was in full operation, the press operator on taste would make three different cuts - "free run", "light press" and "hard press". These three cuts would be put into different tanks and go through a cold settling process before eventually being blended together. 

Me my Crush Pad, Chardonnay grapes being
 processed ready to be made for our Oyster Bay Sparkling wine. 

As harvest was the wettest on record this year, botrytis was the biggest concern, as it gives off dusty flavours in the wine. This is of course a concern for all wine makers. To eradicate these flavours, the use of activated carbon as a fining agent is used.  In order to determine how much carbon to use to ameliorate botrytis flavours, we prepared small carbon fining trials in 100ml of wine, with different dosage rates, e.g. - 0.1g/l, 0.2g/l, 0.3g/l and 0.4g/l.  With 0.1g/l taking out very little colour and a little dusty botrytis characteristics and with 0.4g/l taking out much more of both.

Due to the poor weather and botrytis being an issue this year, high levels of laccase occur (as Laccase is found in botrytis.) With high levels of laccase wine tends to oxidise and therefore gives the wine a brown tint.

Here at Delegat´s I learnt how to remove this problem. They do not use pasteurisation, which by definition is the killing of micro flora by taking the wine to 80°C for 30 seconds, then rapidly cooling to <20°C, although this is a common practice in the wine industry world. However here at Delegat´s Hawks Bay we worked to inactivate the polyphenoxidase enzyme laccase (only heated the wine to 60°C for 30 seconds then rapidly cooling to <20°C). This was a really effective way and was really interesting seeing how all this worked!  

Even with the tough weather conditions we had here at Delegat’s, thanks to these techniques we where able to produce wines that had clean, fresh fruit flavour and long term stability. I look forward to seeing my vintage on the shelves! 

Here are some more pictures of the Cellar/ Winery. 

See you soon!!