THE possibly-not-happening, never-starting and now never-finishing grape harvest is still with us.
The later varieties are struggling to ripen due to the cool weather, short days and the bloody rain events that are diluting the sugar in the grapes and causing bunch rot.
What we have harvested has been good so far – no record crops by any stretch of the imagination, but the fruit has met the required quality benchmarks.
We have sent grapes to seven different wineries and still have five of the 13 varieties we grow that are yet to be picked.
In the bigger picture, the excess of red grape production is a real problem, and if China doesn’t come back online soon I can see 30 per cent to 40 per cent of red plantings being simply unwanted and unneeded.
Sadly there are a lot of plantings already being neglected or abandoned.
Australia`s annual crush this year will be well down and the other southern hemisphere wine producing countries, such as Chile, Argentina and South Africa, are all having lower intakes due to the cooler, wetter weather.
The lower production is not seeing more demand in red varieties, especially in our country, where some of our guys are quick to drop their prices when they see an excess of supply, which simply shows the world our very low bulk wine prices and only makes us look cheap and nasty.
Last week, while scanning the skies to see what Mother Nature has in store for us I think I have identified something even Sir David Rabbit Burrow has not yet observed.
A continuous stream of starlings looking for their last feed of grapes for the season were observed flying into the neighbour’s patch of table grapes, eating the large berries and noticed as they were flying away that they had amazingly transformed into the so-called Turbo Chooks, that seemingly arrive from nowhere and cause havoc for the pasture and rice farmers.
I’m not sure what they eat to transform themselves back into starlings in the summer, but I hope they don’t find any of it.
