Ah yes, small is beautiful

You know what?  The Riverland gets pretty cold in winter.  We have already burnt a tonne of perfectly good dead trees and are on our second load.  This time we got mallee which is a harder wood (I know, I tried and failed to get an axe through it) and so should burn longer and hotter than the previous tasmanian oak.  As you will see from the photos, it is beautifully ugly wood.  A pile of it resembles some horrific collection of bones.

  

The love of wine has been returning after a long vintage spent getting a bit sick of it.  The ones that turned it for me were a 2002 Ashton Hills Five Merlot blend (Adelaide Hills, SA - $35) and the 2008 Jasper Hill Georgia's Paddock Nebbiolo (Heathcote, VIC - $65).  The Ashton Hills was perfectly ready and perfectly ripe, a wonderfully balanced tight rope walk a mile away from green and mean and another mile from fat and hot.  I was very pleasantly surprised and it served as a timely reminder that wine should almost always be made in small volumes by someone who cares.  So should most things come to that, but reality bites.  The Jasper Hill took a more ethereal, high toned (VA?  Maybe. Who cares?), light and graceful turn, a wonderful compote of red fruits, florals and proper tannins, the sort you used to be able to buy by the pound at the local shop in the good old days.

By way of contrast, all our wines here at the winery have now finished malo, nearly all have been noisily centrifuged onto bags of oak chips of varying colours, shapes and effects.  Some of it is looking quite reasonable, the Petit Verdot for example.  Some of it; is not.