Our Vineyard
The Leabrook Estate vineyard lies in the Onkaparinga Valley in the Eastern area of the Adelaide Hills. The climate is well suited to most cool climate varieties and ripening is usually reliable, provided the fruit is exposed to light and there is no over cropping.
My vineyard lies on a gentle slope with relatively shallow soils. The soil profile consists of clays over dolomite and is reasonably well drained.
The vineyard is protected from the prevailing winds causing good fruit set from flowering.
The vines are grown on their own rootstock and are planted on a 1.2 metre grid to provide competition and control vigour. Close spacing of vines requires heavy pruning, resulting in extremely low yields and consequentially intensive grape fruit flavours. The narrow rows are hedge pruned in the growing season and are trained with adjustable trellis wines to ensure all growth is vertical and does not shade the fruit.
Hedge pruning exposes the fruit to light, necessary to achieve grapes of the highest quality. If the season has been too favourable for the vine, and foliage is excessive, workers are dispatched to the vineyard prior to harvest, plucking leaves from around the bunches to expose the fruit, and cutting away excessive growth. Fruit quality can also be affected by other factors. All Leabrook Estate vineyards are netted to minimise bird damage. A large fan has been installed in the lower lying frost prone area of the vineyard to circulate air on frosty mornings and protect the young growing shoots.
Leabrook Estate's policy is to achieve the best possible quality fruit. Vines are stressed with water levels kept to the minimum, while still providing healthy leaves to aid ripening. Spraying for mildew are kept to the very minimum; pesticide sprays are non existent, relying on natural predators to control pests.
Picking time is a very complex affair. Up to 30 small batches of grapes are sampled and tested for taste and physical characteristics from the 2 hectare vineyard, and a picking strategy is developed over several weeks to provide the particular flavour profile designed for Leabrook Estate Wines.
All fruit is hand picked with any damaged or unripe fruit discarded in the vineyard and during a final sorting during the crushing process at the winery. Great care is taken during picking and transportation such that the fruit arrives at the winery in exactly the same condition as existed on the vine.
A small group of pickers are employed to ensure a constant flow of fruit from the vineyard to the winery for immediate processing.
The same care extends through the winemaking process, when only gentle crushing is performed and there is no rough pumping of must, relying only on gravity to take the grapes into their fermentation stage.