"What's good for the pastures is bad for the vines." (Montaigne, FYI). After a third La Nina summer, by hanging on till April, we were...

A tree fell in the forest. To be specific, an American Red Pine, the last of four planted in 1900 to mark the boundaries of the Jamieson...

La Nina, the Negative Indian Ocean Dipole and the South Polar Vortex hate me. It’s mutual. Pax to the marketing departments at Chateau...

Rose. Strictly between ourselves I used to think of it as a bit of a sissy girls’ drink. Then, in 2020 when we were shrouded in bushfire...

♫ Hey-la, hey-la, My Birdfriend’s Back! ♫ Well, it’s possible he’s not the same lyrebird. But it cheered me up no end when I was putting...

.. it was the worst of years. I'm not referring to COVID, the war in Europe, the global economic crisis or the rise of autocracy. And I...

In 1990, my old friend Ian Roberton, who is a judge at the UK Cheese Awards and the World Cheese Awards, founded Meribel Fine Foods, a...

Xi-Who-Must-be-Obeyed has banned us, but while it’s still legal I still get around: It’s OK! I saved the Mount Terrible! Shiver me...

Guess what I got for my, er, my most recent birthday. Plan is to upload videos to show how things evolve over the course of one season....

Swings and roundabouts. From the viticultural (if no other) point of view, 2021 was a very, very good year. But instead of 50 of our...

2020 ... What to say? Pandemics, B J and Brexit, the Donald: the grim news has been relentless. Not much to try and be funny about with...

Water shoots, unwanted green shoots that spring from buds on the vine trunk and divert energy from fruitful shoots on the cordon: they’re...

I know you can fake this kind of thing with Photoshop, but I’m not that smart: we really did have snow here last month. Last time that...

I've always been reluctant to blow my own trumpet. Something to do with being beaten up in the playground while the Christian Brothers...

Rick Kinzbrunner from Gianconda, Lee Duffy from E E Muir, Ben Rose from Toolangi all told me I should. Richard Smart’s been banging on...

As The Regular Reader (thank you, Mother) of these Posts will remember, this time last year we proudly announced our acquisition of an...

2020: where to begin? November brought high winds and a cold snap at flowering which affected fruit set. This was followed by extreme...

By mid-January it was not looking good. For weeks we'd been on high alert for fires. Then came smoke. We'd gone through all this before,...

Friends and neighbours Grant McRostie and Russ Bryant have decided to plant vines: 2 acres of Chardonnay this year, from which we plan to...

For more than twenty years we have been growing olives and leaving them for the birds. Janene has had a couple of goes at pickling olives...