2026 Vintage Report

Edition 1: We got off to an early start and at the rate we are going I might only write two of these reports.

We started picking Thursday last week and by the end of today we will have just shy of 400 tonnes in the winery. The heat over Christmas, and Thursday through to Saturday of last week, was hotter than anticipated and the major effect has been the dehydration of the berries, which were not big to start with. We all thought we had a smaller vintage this year, following a big one last year, but this is not the case and nature has done something different. The three or four days of forty degree temperatures reduced the amount of juice in the berries, and so the sugars jumped up.

Since Sunday it has been cooler, particularly at night. We have had good cloud cover, which is great for the pickers. Ripening has slowed down in the last few days and given us some chance of catching up. The crop looks like being the same as last year, but in some places considerably higher.

The majority of what we have picked so far has been Chardonnay and some Semillon from south of the winery, with a couple of truckloads of Verdelho from the Upper Hunter. As usual, we started in the south and moved our way north. With all of the whites south of the winery picked, I must say ‘Pokolbin Hills is terrific’. We seem to have a pretty good crew in both the winery and vineyard, and we have got up to 100 grape pickers which allowed us to finish all of the Pokolbin Hills Semillon in one day. 

We picked some of the top Chardonnay with DeBeyers, NVC and the Road Block now in tank. The little bit of rain we have had has slowed them down and dropped the sugars a bit. We have picked all of the Stevens’ white, with a small crop as it received hail just before Christmas similar to the previous year. All of the good HVD Chardonnay has now been picked and we will finish the Short Flat today. So, Vat 47 Chardonnay is now in tank. It seems a very short amount of time to have picked the fruit that we have and the vineyard crew, under Brent Hutton, have done a terrific job particularly Joel who drives the harvester and Nathan and Jake who run the handpicking teams. 

Across the board, I do not think we could be much happier with the quality of the juice. The flavours have all arrived towards the end of last week, and one of the two lots of Semillon is half a degree higher in alcohol than we would like. I think these wines will be a bit like the 2018 vintage. The rest have got wonderful flavour, great acid and pH. 

If we keep going at this rate vintage will be over in a fortnight as it looks like the reds will come in straight after the whites.

Edition 2: The last week has seen vintage move ahead at quite a pace. We have picked, and crushed, 420 tonnes of our own fruit. We have about sixty tonnes of white left to pick, and this includes the Fiano which is at least a week or more away. We have run a team of eighty to ninety pickers, and the harvester has worked pretty much every night. The night harvesting team had the night off last night which they needed, and they will come back for two to two and half nights to finish the Casuarina Chardonnay. 

There is about thirty to forty tonnes of Semillon, all HVD, to be picked and this is in very good condition and does not cause me too many worries. However, with a couple of hot days over the weekend I do not think the whites are going to go any further. They will just lose fluid, and acid, if they stay out in the sun. So as I said, the plan is to finish our white by Saturday. In general, the crop is running at the same level as last year. We have just picked it in a week’s less time. The staff are starting to show some signs of weariness, and it will be good to give them most of the long weekend off.

We have picked Pinot Noir from HVD for the Sparkling base, and will follow through to pick the rest of it here around the winery. There is plenty of colour and flavour, and clean fruit, so we should get a decent Vat 6 this year. Pinot Noir has also been a challenge in that it is ready to pick when either Vat 1 or Vat 47 are ready, and so it gets left behind. This year we pulled in a team of contract pickers who came in specifically to do the Pinot Noir, and that has allowed us to get it at its prime. Pinot Noir can go from green to over ripe in a matter of a few hours so you really need the ability to strike quickly as it is ripening.

Overall, the crop is quite similar to last year and Andrew Spinaze seems very happy with all the whites. The Semillon crop is about the same as last year, which was a big year. Chardonnay is up in crop but not as much, and we will see, next week, how the Shiraz goes. The Verdelho is all in tank, and fermenting, and like the Semillon and Chardonnay beautiful clean fruit, flavour ripe and good acid. 

One thing that stands out over these first two weeks is the overall quality of the fruit, condition of the bunches and the flavour. Everyone has got a smile on their face, so it has got to be good.

Edition 3: For the Hunter Valley vintage, this is my third report and the way we are going there could only be another one to go. We finished all of our own white grapes last Saturday, and we still have to pick the Fiano which will come off on Friday night/Saturday morning and then its reds only. 

The tonnages have come in close to what we budgeted for our grape growers, and we are over one hundred plus tonnes from our own vineyards. Most of the over run to budget is from Semillon. A lot of us felt it was not possible to match the 2025 vintage, but this year white wines were close to last year and in some cases over by 5% to 10%. 

The Chardonnay will be almost exactly what we expected, and the Verdelho is exactly the same tonnage as last year. The two hot weekends in particular probably pushed the sugars up a bit early, and last week was quite cool so the fruit evened itself out a bit with acids coming down and sugars largely remaining the same. 

So across the board, the 2026 whites will be a little bit bigger, and fuller, than last year and certainly the year before. The acids and pHs are good and they should live, and have that wonderful freshness on the finish, that the Hunter Valley is famous for. All in all, I do not think we could be much happier with the white vintage.

Tuesday, we started the red vintage with a couple of blocks of harder country that could have done with some more leaf, but they were at 14% alcohol equivalent, great deep purple colour and plenty of flavour. Today is the ‘star’ day. We are picking the Old Patch from Old Hillside Vineyard, and the second team will be picking Shiraz on the back of Montana. It is a bit early to tell with the Pinot Noir as it has just come off skins, but I am pretty sure there will be a Vat 6 with a decent amount of Special Release. 

The crop is close to what we expected, and I think the reds will suffer from having small berries, but of course this will give us more colour. We picked two thirds of the Black Ridge last night with the harvester, and the crop level there is about one tonne per acre and it should go to Hunter Valley or better.

So, from here on we will move steadily through the reds. The hand picking of reds will take longer than the whites as we reduced our picking team by about 50%. The reds are a lot quicker and easier to pick, however the reduced size of the picking team has put up the rate per person. We have a hot weekend coming with a couple of days of nearly forty degrees forecast, with a cool southerly change coming Sunday night, and hopefully a storm with it, to help put a bit of moisture back into the fruit. 

This has been a relatively easy, but quick, vintage and we will probably only be picking for four weeks, and then we have got a month, or more, until we have to worry about Heathcote Shiraz. I remember years where we had the first of Heathcote picked before we had finished the Shiraz here.

Edition 4: We are now heading into the last few days of vintage, which seems like it only started yesterday. We should be finished picking all of our own, and our grower’s fruit, by Saturday lunchtime. Four weeks and two days is a short vintage. I remember somewhere in the past, I think it was 1979, we picked for eight weeks.

We have been blessed with the weather. The only major problem being two lots of two days each over forty degrees, and we were lucky that we had enough canopy, and sunscreen, to protect the vines and so we ended up with very little sun affected fruit. 

We finished all the white at the end of last week as the Broke area, which is always two weeks later than here, was ready to go. The Fiano looks very good, but we just got it in time. We started picking the Shiraz at the end of last week, with a good solid yield. The berries were all in good condition, and the fruit came off easily for both the handpickers and the machine. The difference in picking costs between hand and machine is $800 to $900 per tonne, and with 65 dozen to the tonne the maths is pretty easy.

All of the great vineyards are now picked with the exception of Johnno’s, 8 Acres, some of Old Hillside and a little bit of Stevens. The Stevens fruit is still not quite as ripe as we would like it and we may have to push the Saturday’s harvesting back into next week, but by the look of the weather I would prefer to get it off by Saturday. If the fruit gets knocked down twice, which has happened on the two hot days, it very rarely comes back as good the third time so I think we will probably take what we have got and get it into tank.

The picking costs continue to be down, which is as a result of a bigger crop, a couple of really good young blokes running the picking teams and good quality people in our picking teams. In the fermenter, the reds so far have got amazing dark purple colours, denser than last year. There is plenty of flavour and good tannin acid balance. 

All in all, I have to say “we couldn’t really be any happier with this year’s vintage”, but all will be revealed when we get the wines on the tasting bench in a month or so.

Edition 5: Last Saturday, about lunchtime, we finished picking grapes in the Hunter Valley. Vintage has lasted for only four weeks and three days, which is one of the shorter vintages in sometime. The end of the first week of February is one of the earliest vintages I can remember. I think 1981 may have been the earliest starting on the 3 January, and I remember Arrowfield picked their first grapes on New Year’s Eve.

It is probably one of the easiest vintages that I have seen with everything ripening pretty much in order by variety and sub-region. For instance, Stevens Semillon is always ready before HVD and Belford. So, if we had to we could predetermine our picking plan. 

Our picking crew has been constant throughout the whole of vintage, with very few grey nomads and mostly young people from Europe, particularly France. They have been a really good group of young people who always seem to be happy and just got on and did the job. Our two picking team members Nathan Limberiou and Jake Norton have done an excellent job in managing the people, but also managing the number of moves that the team had to make to get everything picked in the desired order.

All of the equipment worked well after the first two days of teething problems that we have every year, except for the harvester which gave up with one day’s picking left to do. It is nearly time to replace the harvester, which should not be too hard as the state of the industry has left a lot of harvesters, that have done little work, available for sale. Joel Clarke, who has operated the machine all vintage, has done a great job as most of the harvested fruit was as clean as the handpicked. He has learnt, this vintage, how to make the harvester work, and learnt to adjust as he goes through different parts of the block.

We can happily say that the quality seems to be there, right across the crop, with only a few small bits needing any real attention. We will have plenty of Hunter Valley Semillon particularly, and it will be great quality. The two big chunks of vineyard in HVD, and the grapes we purchased from Dave McWilliam, have both given us flavour and freshness ideal for this wine.

We had some heat before we started to pick the reds that reduced the juice in the berries, but we obviously got some more sugar and the acids, and pHs, have remained at pretty good levels. All the red has got great colour, nose and flavour, and you know where you are fifty metres from the red shed just by the smell of the ferments.

So like 2025, the 2026 vintage, both red and white, is going to be very good. 

Yours sincerely

Bruce Tyrrell, AM