Moorooduc Estate Shiraz McIntyre Vineyard Mornington Peninsula

stablished in 1981 by Richard and Jill McIntyre, Moorooduc Estate is a small, family-run winery that has developed an enviable reputation for complex and food friendly wines. The Moorooduc team now includes daughter Kate (MW, 2010), viticulturist Hugh Robinson, black standard poodle Samwise Gamgee and Reg, the resident peacock. The core belief at Moorooduc is that the fundamental quality and character of fine wine comes from the vineyard where the grapes are grown. Grapes are sourced from four established vineyards in the Moorooduc sub-region of the Mornington Peninsula. The overall climate in this part of southern Victoria is temperate, with a moderate rainfall, mainly in the winter and spring. The critical ripening period for wine grapes is in the late summer and autumn, which is the most stable season with, in general, cool nights and dry, sunny days. The main vineyard – McIntyre Vineyard – is five hectares sitting 250 feet above sea level on a gentle north to north-westerly facing slope. The topsoil is very sandy but the subsoil is unusually vine-friendly clay with veins of sand. Deep down in this layer one encounters red colored clay and rock indicating the presence of oxides of iron. Once the vines reach maturity, they require no irrigation, having put their roots deeply into this layer. The oldest vines were planted in 1983. Over recent years, a grafting program created an interesting mix of Pinot Noir clones, some grafted onto original (1983) plantings. Most of the vines across the Moorooduc vineyards are managed by spur pruning and vertical shoot positioning. During the growing season, the vines receive intensive, hands on attention, which Moorooduc believes is necessary to produce quality fruit in our climate. Shoots are thinned early in the season to achieve ideal shoot density in the canopy. Three pairs of moveable catch wires are lifted progressively to produce a vertical canopy. Trimming is done at least once and leaf plucking on the east side of the canopy is usually undertaken, especially for Pinot Noir. Fine-tuning of crop levels occurs a few weeks before veraison (the phase when the berries soften and color appears in the red grapes), when required. All the fruit is hand harvested and this usually occurs during March. In the winery, the emphasis is on gentle handling of the fruit and natural wine making methods with some quality control. For the white wines, the freshly picked whole bunches are gravity fed into the press where a program designed for a sparkling wine base is used to separate the juice from the skins, pips and stems. The (cloudy) juice from the press is not settled but transferred to the fermentation vessel – almost always oak barrels. Fermentation occurs naturally (wild yeasts) and the wine remains on lees until it is assembled for final treatments such as fining and bottling. More often than not, a natural malolactic fermentation takes place in barrel. For the red wines, the whole bunches of grapes are cooled and (usually) de-stemmed but not crushed, and dropped directly into our two-ton open fermenters, thus avoiding the need to pump must. After four to six days of maceration, the primary (wild yeast) fermentation begins. This takes about a week to complete with the temperature peaking at about 93o Fahrenheit. A few more days on skins completes a total maceration time of 19-21 days when the new wine is pressed and, after a day or two to settle out the gross lees, it is transferred to barrel. A natural malolactic fermentation occurs in the following spring. The wine is racked only once when it is assembled and prepared for bottling.