Moss Wood 2021 Semillon

Vintage Notes

The 2020/21 growing season got underway with budburst right on average and things looked promising from the start.  Regular rain kept the soil moisture topped up and this continued until December.  Although it brings with it complications, spring rainfall is very important for dry-farmed vineyards like Ribbon Vale and Moss Wood and gives the vines plenty of water to keep them going through the dry summer months.

All the signs were good but we got a bit edgy as the Semillon came into flowering in the first week of November.  The rain was quite steady and for the month we received 78mm.  With this came cool temperatures and between the two it eventually had quite an impact on our yields.  At 5.79 t/ha, the crop was down 55%, as we picked fewer and much lighter bunches.  We had been expecting some losses but got something of a shock at harvest when we realised how small the crop actually was.

Nevertheless, we were comfortable with how the season progressed.  Temperatures were generally mild and ripening was accordingly slow but steady and we expected to start picking Semillon slightly earlier than average around 10^th March.  February arrived, and we thought we were in the home straight.  Silly us!  Mother Nature had one more challenge up her sleeve.

In the first week, Cyclone Seroja approached the Western Australian coast, eventually passing over the top of Kalbarri, about 800 kilometres north of Moss Wood.  The winds were never a threat but the associated rain band delivered us 82mm rain.  This caused us to hold our breathe for a day or so while we waited to see if there would be much splitting of the near-ripe and soft grapes and then whether we would be threatened by disease.

In the end we had little to fear.  We had some splitting in Semillon but our spray program gave good control over botrytis, so disease wasn’t a problem.  It’s interesting to speculate as to why there wasn’t more harm.  We believe our soils play an important role because they’re free-draining, allowing the water to move away fairly quickly.  Humidity drops accordingly and reduces the disease pressure.

A wine style consequence of the rain was not dissimilar to what happened in the Pinot Noir in 2019.  A reasonable percentage of berries began to raisin, courtesy of the rain damage, concentrating the sugar.  However, the majority of the berries, that also deliver the wine flavours, remained unripe and we had to wait for them to reach full flavour ripeness before we could pick.  The resulting harvest ripeness of 14.9 Baume is well above our long-term average of 12.7 and means we’ve made a very generous 2021 Semillon indeed.

We’ve discussed this in our newsletter before the idea that history never repeats but it definitely rhymes.  It’s been a long time since we had a similar vintage and we have to go back 32 years to 1988/89 to find the rhyming season.

After the rain delay, we took the Semillon off roughly 2 weeks later than average, on 22^nd March.