Vineyard Profiles |
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We continue our feature of introducing you to a few Ballarat vineyards.... to show you where the wine comes from. After all, good wine is definitely made in the vineyard. There are a number of things that come to influence a vineyard's potential to produce high quality fruit, and the interactions can be quite complex. Often, two adjacent blocks of vine can produce two quite different wines. | |||
The French understand this concept better than most - they have a term,
terroir, which encompasses all the influences that come to bear on what
sort of wine is produced from a given block of vines. These influences
can range from obvious, to quite subtle:
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A hands-on approach in the vineyard. Ballarat’s marginal climate demand labour intensive practices in the vineyard to achieve optimal ripeness and flavour in the grapes. These practices include shoot thinning and intensive foliage management, leaf plucking to provide an open canopy and crop-thinning to regulate yield. This labour intensive approach dictates that most vineyards in the Ballarat area are smaller than those in warmer areas, but then the person you meet at cellar door is also most likely the owner – who can tell you what it is like in the vineyard in all seasons.
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