Looking at the 2006 Mollydooker Vintage

by Leigh Gawith - Vineyard Manager for Mollydooker Wines

General overview of the vintage: we have had an extraordinary weather year this year.  It started off with sufficient and continuous rain that we did not have to irrigate one single block in order to get the canopies of sufficient size to ripen the crops.

On the other hand, it then took a while to stop the vines so that they would concentrate on the fruit, and because of the “easy” water a lot of vineyards wanted to set crops that were heavier than usual. Where that was the case, our good growers did very early crop thinning or bunch removal so that quality has been in no way compromised.

Then we were blessed with a summer that had maximum temperatures in the 22 to 30 Centigrade (72 to 86 F) that is the ideal for photosynthetic accumulation of color and flavor, with cool nights which have kept the colors bright. We did have the occasional heat spike with 2 to 4 days of 40+ C (104 F), but this (fortunately) caused minimal damage in the vineyards.

Since then, and having picked a quarter of the crop, the Shiraz colors and flavors have gone to the end of the scale, with Merlot simply the best we’ve seen. Cabernet is tardier but is just starting to show the characters in the juice that we’ve come to expect. The surprising thing about all this is that we haven’t had to push the vines to the limit to achieve this, so the wines should be marginally less alcoholic, with the usual abundance of flavor, color and velvet mouth feel that we’ve all come to expect from “Sparky juice”.