2008 Report

Past Reports

2008 Vintage Report

Seasonal data, as well as our own experiences, for Vintage 2009 in Marlborough shows that it was a cooler and wetter growing season than the last few, and indeed, the long term average. High rainfall from spring to the end of March meant that once again botrytis infections became a real possibility in grapes starting to soften in early ripening sites such as our own estate vineyard.

Thankfully, our vineyard practices, centred around good fruit exposure and organic canopy spray programs to increase vine health and natural disease resistance, played a huge part in our grapes surviving this period, and lady luck also played her hand to our benefit in that the rain stopped pretty much at the right time allowing whatever botrytis that had developed to dry out and thus be controlled.

Framingham's harvest started on the 19th March with, very unusually, some botrytis affected Riesling that we had thought about cutting out to protect the ripening fruit around it. As I mentioned before, the botrytis was able to dry out, and tasting the grapes, we found some attractive and individual flavours that we decided to keep. That juice has been turned into a spicy, complex sweet wine fermented with wild yeasts that we may or may not put out as an individual bottling.

Following on almost two weeks later we took the first Pinot Noir, and then another sweet juice from very ripe and dehydrated grapes at the extremely stony ends of the rows of the estate Gewürztraminer which, though an early harvest for us, is essentially a late-harvest (Vendange Tardive) style. This has been turned into a massively complex, spicy, sweet wine with native yeasts, some of which I hope to bottle later in the year. So, an unheard of start for vintage 2009 with two sweet wines in the bag before any table wines!

Following this, we had an extremely intense period of 12 days picking from April Fool's Day during which the back of our harvest was broken, with only two sections left out after the 12th April. Warm weather and drying, warming soils meant flavours (and sugars) moving very quickly and we had to cram into just a few days a huge amount of time consuming hand picking for Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir, Gewürztraminer and Viognier. The last of our machine harvested Sauvignon Blanc was taken in a week later, with Montepulciano some 10 days after that. At the time of writing, we are poised to pick the remaining Noble Riesling in a few days time.

Quality? Well, quality is very much our focus every year but you won't hear us crowing about "best ever" this or "stunning" that as seems the norm now every season. The wines from 2009 will I think be a little bolder than 2008 (which has been an extraordinarily successful one for us with the critics up to now), many will have maybe an extra half percent alcohol, and at this stage I'm not too disappointed in anything. Time will reveal all, as it does for every vintage, the 2008 wines took some time to settle down in the cellar, whereas this year's are more forward at this point. We have been expanding our winemaking year on year with more wild ferments, longer lees aging, and some small amounts of alternative styles of wine to our current range are in the pipeline from both 2008 and 2009. More on those later in the year.