'Midnight Dilemma' Shiraz 2022

Winemaking

Incredibly clean fruit was delicately handled with frequent pump-overs to introduce oxygen to the ferment which promotes yeast health, red fruit characters and softer tannins. After fermentation and a light pressing, the Midnight Dilemma was transferred to neutral French oak for full malo and 10 months of relaxation. It remained unfiltered and unfined and was bottled in January, 2023.

Vineyard

Being a smaller, family-owned vineyard, a lot of care goes into canopy management. Practices such as shoot thinning are used to concentrate the vines’ energy into producing fewer, higher-quality bunches. Such techniques also minimise reliance on pesticides.

The vineyard lies on the east-facing side of the Mount Camel Range. The range was formed on a fault line with nutrient-rich, Cambrian-aged* metabasalts being forced to the surface. The mixing of these decomposed metabasalts with seafloor sediments (chert, jasper, siltstone etc.) provides the strikingly red, iron-rich, well-draining soil that makes this site so desirable. 

The vineyard owner/manager, Gerard Kennedy, is reluctant to use herbicides and will only do so in areas that really need them. Given the typically warm, dry summers experienced in Heathcote, 9/10 vintages do not present high disease pressure so sprays are kept to a minimum.

*The basaltic rock is referred to as being "Cambrian" as it was formed during the Cambrian period, approximately 485-540 million years ago

Artwork

For Midnight Dilemma, Kate Lewis painted one of the horses from the farm I grew up on. The painting gets better every time I look at it - the shimmer on the horse’s black coat and the eye-catching blue-on-orange stripes get me every time. The painting represents the starkly opposing directions a decision can take you, especially one made at midnight.