Vintage underway at DAFWA
Each year a number of research projects undertaken by the department comprise a winemaking component. This year we are seeing a continuation of two national projects; ‘Assessing clonal variability in Chardonnay and Shiraz for future climate change’ and ‘Genomic basis of clonal variation in Cabernet Sauvignon wine grapes’.
These two projects comprise 1600kg of fruit and 38 separate batches, batch sizes range from 15 to 50kg lots. This amount of fruit brings DAFWA’s small wine laboratory to capacity however staff will be pushing the limits and squeezing in another winemaking project. The third project will be examining the impact of three different crop loads on Tempranillo wine quality. With only 90kg of fruit required for this project we are hoping for an easy squeeze.
Although the wine laboratory is modest in size and equipment, there has been a new addition to help processing efficiencies. For a number of years all grapes processed at the department had been pressed via an old yet trusty 15kg capacity press. Although perfect for handling small volumes of fruit, it had in previous years proved a bottleneck when processing parcels in excess of 20kg.
This year a second press has been installed with a whopping 80kg capacity which is providing a significant improvement in the processing time for ‘large’ batches.
Wines produced from the 2015 vintage will be used for chemical and sensory analysis and also for industry workshops.