In this pictorial we follow the progress of the 2006 vintage of Bush Vine Mataro which provides much of the fruit for two of our icons wines - the Bull's Blood and the Heinrich. more...
The new crew is about three weeks into the 2010 vintage season, and it's nice to see they are all still smiling. This is because the weather has been luxuriously cool (and quite liveable)which means the grapes are ripening slowly, drawing up the goodness from the soil, and not suffering from any adverse weather conditions, such as heatwaves and floods.
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Every year we employ a "flying winemaker", a winemaker from the Northern Hemisphere who comes to work in the winery in their country's off-season.
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Rolf Binder @ Veritas Winery played host to the Tanunda Town Band on Saturday night, with a program covering some of the best of the classics of Russian composers.
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The Winemakers Rolf and Adam, Cellar Hand Ashley, and Wine Stylist Joolz gathered in Mrs. Binder's Parlour to try a selection of Shiraz from a vineyard along the Gomersal Road, of the Barossa Valley. Rolf and Christa own a share of this vineyard named 'She Oak Rise'. It was planted in 2001, and this is from the fifth harvest of its fruit.
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Winter is a great time of the year while the vines are dormant and we are busy pruning to ensure the grapes for the next harvest. The fields this year have a lush rich green colour as the rains so far have been good and our valuable cover crops in the vineyards are growing well. These crops will be slashed to provide mulch for beneath the vines, as well as being incorporated into the soil to provide organic matter.
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Veritas Winery has a great history of fortified wine production, started by the founders of our winery. When Rolf Binder Senior took over the winery in 1955, and renamed it Veritas, he carried on the production of fortified wines, as it was the market preference of the time. The winery produced 90% fortified wines and only 10% table wines, quite the opposite to today's wine drinking fashion.
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This vintage is now over and we are very happy with the resultant wines. We had a hot spell in the middle of it, felt more by our visiting winemaker from wintry Austria, Herwig Nutz.
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The Tour Down Under is a major event in World Cycling after being granted UCI ProTour status. This is the first cycling race outside of Europe to be given this ranking.
South Australia hosts the Tour Down Under and we see hundreds of thousands of visitors, both national and international, to the state.
With a leg of the race held in the Barossa Valley, we had many visitors to our winery, and saw the race pass by our front sign.
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Just prior to Christmas, a Veritas winemaker approached Julie with a glass of suspicious looking black mud.
"Try this", he said, with a cheeky gleam in his eye. With a big breath and a pinched nose, Julie dipped her finger into the sludge and tentatively tasted it. The heady sweet flavours and creamy palate indicated that this was not a cruel trick.
"It's white port" was the response to Julie's querying look and blissful smile.
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One of the activities at Rolf Binder wines during the week of the Barossa Festival was to hold a mataro masterclass and about 20 people wine lovers were put through their paces.
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I have a joint venture with an old school friend who owns a very important vineyard in the centre of the Barossa Valley. James and Jacqui Hahn in fact live in the original family home that was completed in 1848.
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Bringing together all the building blocks that make up one of our flagship wines is always exciting. In November, 2006 we assembled all the components that could be used for our flagship ‘Bulls Blood’ or Hubris as it is called outside of Australia.
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All I did was build an extension to the winery a few years back to house all the barrels of red and lo and behold it turns out it is the perfect shape for amplifying and expressing music, particularly singers and classical music ensembles.
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Visiting us this week was Ric Einstein, better known in wine circles as "Torbwine" (TORB = The Opinionated Red Bigot). A long time lover of red wines, Ric and his two "partners in wine", John Davis (The Pie King of SA) and Brian Handreck (aka Red Bigot) traipsed around South Australia, tasting and analyzing red wines from over two hundred wineries.
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Perhaps like most people I have a way of putting off the housekeeping. I moved from the old winery in 1999 but left the fortified wine stocks at the old winery where they have quietly rested. Each year I have been going to move them to the new winery and each year just passed by. Now the job has been done with the help of Kym and Peter our wine makers.
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The following series of photos will show you the process of how we turn the mataro grapes into wine. The photos were taken during the 2006 vintage.
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The other day I lined up the sixty or so barrels which will be blended to make the Rolf Binder Heinrich 2005 which contains shiraz, grenache and mataro. This tasting was being done not to astutely assess the quality of each barrel but rather to find which barrels were so different to the others that they should be excluded from the final blend. Myself and wine maker Kym Teusner, were also on the watch for wine that was faulty and would be rejected, or needed a bit of sulphur, this being detected by an aldehydic character as oxygen goes about destroying the wine.
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In 1995 I spoke at a conference in Canberra about emerging varieties and I talked about mataro. Now this gave me a strange feeling as in the Barossa there are vines over 100 years old. These were used to make fortified wines and using them to make a classic red wine had to wait for the new era of table wine drinking that began to sweep Australia in the 1970's.
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Red Wines
Veritas Winery has a great history of fortified wine production, started by the founders of our winery. When Rolf Binder Senior took over the winery in 1955, and renamed it Veritas, he carried on the production of fortified wines, as it was the market preference of the time. The winery produced 90% fortified wines and only 10% table wines, quite the opposite to today's wine drinking fashion.
This vintage is now over and we are very happy with the resultant wines. We had a hot spell in the middle of it, felt more by our visiting winemaker from wintry Austria, Herwig Nutz.
In late November 2005, Rolf sat down for a chat with wine merchant David Farmer.
Bringing together all the building blocks that make up one of our flagship wines is always exciting. In November, 2006 we assembled all the components that could be used for our flagship ‘Bulls Blood’ or Hubris as it is called outside of Australia.
In 1995 I spoke at a conference in Canberra about emerging varieties and I talked about mataro. Now this gave me a strange feeling as in the Barossa there are vines over 100 years old. These were used to make fortified wines and using them to make a classic red wine had to wait for the new era of table wine drinking that began to sweep Australia in the 1970's.
