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Hand Made Wines
Adelaide
Plains
&
Mount
Lofty Ranges
South Australia |
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Welcome to Old Plains and Longhop wines
Here you'll find the news and
happenings from our winemaking team.
News Archive
(link)
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Old Vine
Calling - Our new release wines |
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The new release Old Plains range
link to wines page |

Were pleased to announce the new release
of the 2008 Old Plains Old Vines Series. These wines are hand made
from grapes grown in the last remaining old vine vineyards in the
Adelaide Plains region of South Australia.
These vineyards were generally planted post WWII by Italian
migrants, returned servicemen and ex POW's during the 50's.
They survived intact until the 80's when many were
uprooted and replaced by cash crops, market gardens and almond
groves.
Families generally left and acre or two or a couple of rows
for the family cantina wine. Since 2002 Old Plains has been
sourcing these grapes and have now combined all the old vine gear
under the Old Plains label!
Full of power, they ooze all the dark fruit flavours that
only hand made basket pressed wines can offer.
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Unearthing the Adelaide Plains
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Gagliardi vineyard Old Vine Grenache pictured top. Along with a
couple of relics! Pickaxe stubbies burried under vine. |
Vintage 2010 looks to be one of our
finest efforts yet. Literally everything went according to plan.
Starting with shiraz from the old vine sites at Angle Vale
and Gawler River, growers welcomed mild harvest conditions, the
fruit, typically small berries in loose bunches, came in with
sensational flavours, balanced acid and lower baumes.
Healthy conditioning of fruit was reflected across all our
vineyards including the Bibaringa and One Tree Hill sites. Only
one small batch of shiraz had a bit of sunburn.
Twenty Ten was also the year of the easy ferment! Wild
yeasts got them ticking over, finishing off the last couple of
points in barrel seems to really soften the wine.
Our new release One Tree Hill cabernet sauvignon also looks
the goods. Grown at 300 metres altitude we think were onto
something here.
Grenache suffered the effects of the November heat wave.
Yields were well down on previous vintages, however the long mild
summer really helped it along. Interestingly grenache harvest was
our earliest on record. As for quality, the picture above of the
Gagliardi old vine grenache tells the story. Awesome.
What an amazing vineyard, but typically under pressure from
the villa block developers as gutter to gutter housing creeps
closer.
We also stumbled across a couple of relics from the past. Pickaxe brand stubbies of Southwark Bitter, partially burried
under vine. It gave a real sense of times gone by as we imagined a
harvest completed, the slurping down of a couple of coldies at the
end of a hot day.
The least we could do was the same, this time with a Coopers Dark.
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Great, Great Gawler River Grenache
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Pictured above - Old Vine Grenache at Hillier
Pictured right - Torzi and Freeland in one of the vineyards lost
to villa rash, if you look closely you can see the scourge in the
background spreading across the hills face and beyond. |
We are forever on the lookout for old vine
material in the Adelaide Plains, so it was with great delight that
Domenic stumbled across a 50 year old planting along the banks of
the Gawler River. Truly a great example of old school viticulture,
planted and nurtured by the Manno family, we're delighted to
welcome it into the Old Plains family. There is also a good whack
of shiraz here aswell. Small berries and loose bunches, so
vintage twenty ten looks the goods.
Not all good news though, two of our previous old vine vineyards
have gone the way of the developer, soon to be villa rash (drinkster
term for housing), these
two small vineyards were at Munno Para West. Hardly iconic
territory, but we loved them none the less.
Sad to see them go, seems the local council views these blocks
like dominos, once one goes the rest will follow. Allegedly an
adjacent block was subdivide forcing the neighbouring vineyard to
be revalued as villa block, the council rate increase was
supposedly so huge, no amount of shiraz was going to cover the
increase.

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