Australian Wine News

2007 Vintage Report for Anderson Winery Rutherglen

by Christobelle Anderson
(Anderson Winery)

2007 was a bizarre season at Anderson Winery, with harvest starting a good month early due to the drought.

Our vineyard is essentially dryland (unirrigated), but thankfully we do have a very small amount of water available for very dry years such as these – otherwise we would have had no crop at all due to the inability of overstressed vines to ripen grapes properly.

Due to the dry conditions and the fact that we were only putting a very minimal amount of water on our vines (just enough to stop the leaves from falling off), the vigour of our vines was very low, and they produced less bunches and smaller berries than normal.

Smaller berries mean a higher skin to juice ratio and therefore more concentration and colour, so our 07 reds are really inky, black and intense. This lower yield also meant that the vines ripened the grapes faster, leading to the very early harvest.

Both our Durif and Petit verdot yielded about half what they normally would, and our Shiraz only yielded a third of normal. We were not affected by frost or bushfires, as many other Victorian vineyards were, so this decrease is simply due to the drought.