September 2026 - Budbreak!

Along the rows this week, the swollen buds that have sat dormant since pruning are splitting open, and out comes the soft, pale green growth that spent winter tucked inside.

This is budbreak, the first visible sign that the vineyard's new season has started. Look closely at one of those young shoots and you'll spot something that looks like a tiny green fist, barely a centimetre long. That's the inflorescence: the miniature cluster that will, eventually, become this season's bunch of grapes.

Right now it's impossible to tell what that bunch will look like. Give it a few weeks and each inflorescence unfurls into a hundred or more small flowers. Every flower that gets pollinated becomes a single berry. That's the whole of flowering and fruit set in one sentence, but it plays out over roughly six to eight weeks, and a lot can happen to a flower between opening and setting.

Farm Manager Dean Leppan isn't ready to call it yet. It's too early to say whether budbreak will come through even across the blocks this year, and that unevenness, if it happens, tends to show up later as uneven ripening at harvest. What matters more right now is the weather between now and fruit set. Mild, settled conditions give the vines the best chance at a uniform start, without the wind damage or cold snaps that can knock flowers off before they're pollinated.

Next on the list is suckering, when the team moves through the vineyard by hand and removes the shoots growing where they shouldn't: low down on the trunk, doubled up at a single bud, anywhere that would pull energy away from the shoots that are actually going to carry fruit. It's slow work, one vine at a time, and it happens before those shoots get woody and harder to snap off cleanly.

For now, the job is watching and waiting. The next few weeks of weather will tell us more about this vintage than anything we could do in the vineyard ourselves.