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Wines available from The Gurdies Winery

- 2007 Chardonnay
- 2007 Verdelho
- 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon
- 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot
- 2004 Shiraz
- Sweet Rose
- Port

A few simple rules about wine

There's a lot of rubbish written about wines. Some wine writers thrive on complicating the subject but it's really very, very simple.

If you like a particular wine then it's a good wine

You drink wine to enjoy it. We make great wines you can enjoy all the time.

Secondly, if you get bad reactions from wines then it's probably the preservatives poisoning you…

If you've had a ridiculous amount to drink and get a monster hangover then you probably deserve it. But if a few glasses make you suffer then it's probably the preservatives in the wine poisoning you.

Sulphur is the usual culprit. The Romans started burning chunks of sulphur in wine containers as a primitive preservative. The basic principle hasn't changed in the last thousand years. The preservative (sulphur) consumes the air trapped in the bottle leaving just clean wine. Cheap, bulk wines are usually full of preservatives to make sure they stay 'alive'. That's why you get worse hangovers from cheap plonk.

We spend a lot of time and effort making sure everything is spotless in the winery so we can use less preservative to give you better tasting, cleaner wines.

Why not make a totally preservative free wine?

Well it all comes back to the flavours.

We can make a totally preservative free wine but it will turn to vinegar in 6 months time. You do get a wonderful tasting wine, but it's not a very practical solution.

You can get most of the air our wine by bubbling nitrogen through the wine or pasteurising it. But this strips out the flavours and brings us back to the question of why are you drinking wine in the first place?

Because it tastes great and I enjoy it.

For now our best compromise on quality, practicality and taste is to keep the preservative levels very low. Typically less than 50 parts per million (ppm).

The result is very low preservative levels giving less headaches, better flavours, and more enjoyment.

The vineyard

Parts of our vineyard were established in 1982. 20 years in the magic mark when the vines start to develop their best fruit. Young vines produce good quantities of fruit but lacking the wonderful complexity coming from older vines.

How long can a vine can live for? Well no one really knows. There are vines in Australia over one hundred years old. They just keep on producing fruit every year, year after year. There's no reason why vines can't live forever and keep on producing wonderful wines for years to come.

About the vines

A vine is one of the most wonderful plants on this earth. It will grow anywhere from the Australian Snowy Mountains to the Israeli deserts. They'll adapt to most types of water, all soil types and you can train them to grow in any direction you want. But like anything, it's easy to be good at something and hard to be the best. It's easy to make a good wine and very, very difficult to make a great wine. It's easy to get good grapes but it's difficult to get fantastic quality grapes every year, year after year.

A great wine 'myth' says a struggling vine produces the best wine. A vine with balanced growth, good nutrition and plenty of sunlight produces the best fruit.

A guy called Dr Richard Smart, based in Port Macquarie in northern New South Wales is the main opponent of the struggling vine myth. His book, called 'Sunlight into Wine' shows how a balanced vine with plenty of sunlight produces great wine grapes. The theory being that a struggling vine doesn't have a lot of leaves shading the fruit. From there it's a small step to show that proper vine 'training' and shoot positioning give the benefits of a low yield struggling vine from a perfectly healthy happy high yield vine.

Two key vineyard operations are shoot thinning the shoot positioning.

Shoot thinning is the process of removing selected shoots at the start of vintage to produce a balanced vine. The balance is between producing fruit and producing leaves. A vine on its own will try to push out as many shoots as possible. This natural survival process ensures the vine spreads and multiplies. We remove shoots crowded together or growing in the wrong direction. This gives the remaining shoots plenty of light and space and concentrates the vine's resources into the remaining shoots.

Shoot positioning maximises the amount of sunlight available to the vine leaves. A bush shaped vine has some leaves shaded by other leaves. A positioned vine (Vertical Shoot Positioning in our case) puts all the shoots up along the trellis to form a wall of leaves to capture as much sunlight as possible.

Naturally, it's a process that gets fine-tuned each year.

The Gurdies setting and environment

The region around The Gurdies is very sandy. The property sits on top of the Heath Hill fault line which formed The Gurdies hills eons ago. The resulting geology is all sand and gravel. This gives very good drainage for the vines. When the vine is dormant, it's a 'dead stick' in the ground. If the vine's roots are sitting in a poorly drained area they will rot and the vine 'drowns'. When spring comes and the plant should be growing, it can't since it's got no roots left.

The vine roots just keep on going downward since there's no clay barrier to stop them. Our older vines have their roots down 5 or 6 metres. This allows the vines to survive a very dry season with very little (if any) irrigation since they're getting water from a long way down. In turn, we get highly concentrated fruit flavours and not big waterlogged berries.

The end result is:

- We get lots of sunlight onto each leaf (No shading gives higher grape sugar contents = better wines & no wimpy 11% alc. Cabernets)
- More nutrients to each grape give riper berries (No green, leafy characteristics in the wines)
- Better spray penetration into the vine canopy (Less chemicals used so cleaner wines)
- Less irrigation (More concentrated flavours in the berries gives better flavours in the wines)
- Better fruit flavours in the wines (More enjoyment for you)

A good wine starts in the vineyard and is made into a great wine in the winery. If you start with ordinary grapes, you can never produce a great wine, no matter how hard you try.

Heat and air are the enemies of a great wine

Grapes harvested on a hot day will never produce great wines. We harvest on a cool day, process the grapes during the cool of the night and get to watch the sun come up on more than the odd morning. We also list the grape processing temperatures in our tasting notes. But that's just another part of the wonderful experience of wine.

The smell in the winery during vintage is wonderful. A wall of sweet yeasty fruit smell hits you when you walk in each morning. That smell alone is one of the highlights of vintage. All the hard work, the ups and the downs during the year tend to fade away when you get that smell. There really is no way to describe it unless you have experienced it for yourself.

We always have an eye on the thermometer even after vintage has finished. All our barrels and bottles are stored in temperature-controlled areas to mature slowly and surely. Heat is an enemy of wines. The slow controlled chemical reactions in wines at low temperatures are accelerated at higher temperatures so your wines age more quickly but not in a good way. A controlled temperature is one of the keys to storing and ageing wines properly.

We have a free booklet about the 10 most common wine storage problems and how to overcome them. If you don't already have a copy of this, then please subscribe to our newsletter right now and we'll email this valuable booklet straight back to you.

Great Australian oak technology

Oak barrels are used during the winemaking process to give an oak flavour. One of the great winemaking myths is the use of old oak barrels. There's only so much oak flavour available from a barrel before it's 'used up'. Old oak barrels don't give any oak flavour at all but they sure do look great as decorations around the winery.

A wine may require but a few months in a new oak barrel to pick up all the oak flavour the winemaker wants. Of course, this varies with different varieties and vintages. The next time a wine goes into that barrel it may stay there for up to a year to get the same oak flavour as it would from a new barrel. And the third time we use that same barrel we may have to leave the wine for up to 18 months to get some oak flavour.

A barrel can be taken apart and 'shaved'. Each stave (the oak board that a barrel's made from) has a few millimetres shaved off the inside. It is 'toasted' or 'fired' and then you've got a new barrel albeit with thinner walls. (Firing means the inside is charred from a fire using shavings and oak chips) You can use the barrel again but it's not long before it becomes either a decoration in the winery or a flowerpot. It's very difficult to get a watertight seal if they're taken apart again and re-shaved as they've been apart just one too many times.

We've started using an Australian invention called a 'Stack Vat'. It's a 900-litre stainless steel cube with oak side panels and oak 'inserts'. The Stack Vat gives a better oak to wine surface contact area. Because they are so easy to keep clean, they're becoming a 'must have' with the organic wine people. The sides hinge open so every square centimetre can be steam cleaned. Try to do that with a barrel.

The advantages are:

- Easier cleaning gives you cleaner wines
- Cheaper oak means we can use better quality oak on all our wines (Giving you better flavour wines)
- Stack them up with the forklift so we have more wine in the winery (More wine means you get to drink older vintages at better prices)
- Replace the oak when needed so we can keep using new fresh oak all the time (You get a better quality wine)

This is just one more step we take to produce clean wines with exceptional fruit flavours.

What you get with The Gurdies Winery's wines:

- Clean, low-preservative wines (More enjoyment with less headaches)
- The chance to drink medal winning wines all the time (At a reasonable price)
- Luscious fruit flavours in the wines (All our hard work in the vineyard and winery pays off in the results)
- Reliable delivery to your door (We use reliable shippers so you get your bottles intact and on time)
- And we guarantee you'll like our wines (Click here to read your satisfaction guarantee)