I usually bang on about what happened during the vintage, but I thought it might be more interesting from someone else's perspective. So here it is from Scott Hazeldine's viewpoint -

"2006 started with a fairly mild January and early February. The latter saw the completion of Green Harvest. This was immediately followed by approximately 45mm of rain over a 36hr period and then a week of hot weather at the end of February. This resulted in some significant movement in sugar levels within the vines. Certain blocks moved up to an unprecedented 3 Baume in a week and caused some panic amongst the winemakers.

Harvest commenced on the 9th March with a small amount of Lange Muscadelle which was followed by the Semillon. The first red grapes were picked on 17th March.

After initial fears that everything would ripen at once, the weather put the brakes on proceedings, with much of March and April characterised by higher than average rainfall and lower than average temperatures. This ensured Baume levels stabilised after the initial spurt, and ripening was a fairly slow and drawn out process while the pH, TA and flavour compounds caught up.

Despite the weather, most blocks developed well, if a bit slowly, with some nice soft tannins emerging along with good flavours. There was some bagging on the Mataro and the wet conditions did lead to very large bunch weights and the emergence of some botrytis on Grenache. However, this is where our double triage came into its own and the careful removal of these bunches, both in the vineyard and on the tables negated any risk of them getting into the wine. A window of 5 days good weather from the 21st April helped get most things home and the last grapes were picked on 4th May. This was the longest harvest in the company’s history; a massive 57 days of picking. This coupled with a delay in the arrival of the container with the 2005 Exile and Émigré dry goods which also forced us to bottle during harvest, meant that 2006 certainly kept us busy and out of mischief!

In terms of winemaking, this year saw some continued advances in our quest to be innovative. The Company was the first in the world to commercially use “Mistral”, a new automatic sorting system. Having seen it in action during trialling in France late in 2005 we were confident it was up to the job. In fact, it exceeded expectations.

We were also much more aggressive in or ferment management and all batches were finished MLF and residual sugar fairly early on in proceedings, making for a much easier middle of the year where we were able to catch up on racking, blending and bottling.

In an effort to ensure maximum control bottling and laboratory operations continue to be performed in house and in the vineyard, the last 12 months has also seen our Vineyard Manager joined by a full time vineyard team to manage our blocks. This has allowed us to be much more proactive in our viticulture with significant work being done across the board to produce vines of highest quality. We continue to be on the hunt for the right vineyards to add to the portfolio and this year we acquired a portion of land on our Eden Valley ‘Gunyah Vineyard’ previously not under our control, which will supplement our Shiraz and Riesling stocks.

In terms of sales, the year has also seen our continued consolidation into the USA, UK and other parts of the world thus rounding out a successful 2006 and meaning we are all looking forward to the 2007 harvest."