We are now on the 27th of June 2022. We headed out to Lenswood in the Adelaide Hills. We visited the vineyards of Mickey Downer (Murdoch Hill Wines), Brendan Keys (BK Wines) and then out to Gareth Belton of Gentle Folk wines.
This was a work outing – I could see Dylan was in viticulturist mode instead of just showing around. The vineyards here were beautiful. The landscape is that of flowing hill sides – it looks like some areas in Durbanville/Philadelphia or even areas in the Polkadraai in Stellenbosch.
If I remember correctly, 100% of these vineyards where pruned to Guyot. They are so lucky that they can prune like this without but burst issues. Like I said previously, we have been struggling with bud burst in the last few years as our winters are warming up. I also noticed that almost all the vineyards are planted down hill. This is also something you won’t see very often in South Africa, as our soils is prone to erosion. Even though the vineyard block designs look kind of cool, I would have loved to develop a property over there with my engineer surveyor Tian King. Those slopes would make for some amazing designs!!
So I spent the morning learning from Dylan and listening closely to their conversations regarding pruning. Luckily all this is in English!
Lastly we headed out to meet Gareth. I’ve done some work for Dylan on Gareth’s vineyards and I know Adi Badenhorst is good friends with Gareth – so I was looking forward to meeting him. Gareth was actually born in South Africa!
We had a great lunch, chatted about loads of stuff, including Gareth’s cricket career in school and then we headed back. My time in Australia was running out and I still had so much more I wanted to see!
