Liz is part of the cellar door dream team and is most often to be found in cellar door on Friday, Sunday and Monday. Liz is passionate about wine, and has many a story to tell. She and her husband Paul run a tour company on the Peninsula so do ask her for hot tips of where else to visit when you are down on the Peninsula.

The wine growing regions surrounding the city of Melbourne and Port Phillip Bay include the Mornington Peninsula, the Yarra Valley, the Macedon Ranges, Gippsland and the Geelong region. 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 (in cooler years), into autumn, which is the most stable season with, in general, cool nights and dry, sunny days.

The Mornington Peninsula enjoys a cool maritime version of this climate, being almost surrounded by water. The effect of this is to reduce diurnal temperature variation, increase humidity and make it distinctly cooler than some of the other regions.
 
The more northern part of the Peninsula, for example, around Moorooduc is distinctly different in climate from the more southerly parts around Red Hill and Main Ridge, the latter being higher in altitude (up to 300m) and more influenced by the ocean (Bass Strait) with the result that these subregions are even cooler than the Moorooduc subregion and with a higher rainfall. 

The soils in the North are generally sedimentary soils with different levels of sandy loam on sandy clay.  Some vineyards have some ironstone shot through them, and in the south we see a significant number of vineyards on volcanic soil.
 
Vineyards tend to produce vigorous vines which require intensive viticulture to combat the risk of plant fungal diseases (powdery and downy mildews, botrytis, grey rot), in some seasons.

In recent years Moorooduc Estate has become passionate about improving the health of our soils through “regenerative agriculture”. Healthy soils teem with life, both macroscopic and microscopic. Most agricultural soils on earth are degraded as a result of industrial agriculture, with little life other than plant roots, low levels of organic matter, and poor structure limiting water holding capacity and aeration.

Life on earth is dependent on energy from the sun, converted to chemical energy by plants (photosynthesis) – nature’s “carbon capture and storage” system which began about 2.7 billion years ago. In healthy soils, plants feed a significant proportion of the carbon-based compounds derived from photosynthesis to soil microbes (fungi, bacteria and archaea) in exchange for nutrients such as Nitrogen.  This is called the liquid carbon pathway and is a symbiotic relationship between the root systems of plants and soil microbes.

“Regenerative Agriculture” aims to restore soil health and this symbiotic relationship with microbes. It is science based, providing aims and principles and a “toolbox” to work with.

Some key principals of Regenerative Agriculture that we are integrating into our viticulture include avoiding bare soil and soil disturbance such as tillage; avoiding chemical intervention; seeking plant and thus microbial diversity; encouraging living roots in soil by planting multivarietal cover crops.
We would also like to integrate animals in the future.
 
We are learning all the time – our biggest lesson thus far from regenerative viticulture is the knowledge that in a healthy soil, living plants, through the liquid carbon pathway, are the givers of the energy all living things need.  

Much of our knowledge of how to handle the grape vine has evolved over the past 40 years.  Today we prune using soft pruning methods so as not to impede the sap flow within the vine. 

Most of the vines across the five vineyards are managed by cane pruning and vertical shoot positioning. During the growing season, the vines receive intensive, hands-on attention, which we believe 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 foliage 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 done, especially for Pinot Noir. Fine-tuning of crop levels occurs a few weeks before veraison (the phase when the berries soften and colour appears in the red grapes), when required. 

Accurate crop estimation through the growing season is essential for producing quality wines.  Hugh Robinson has played an essential role in making accurate estimates for us and the team at Peninsula Vinecare continue to assist us with our viticultural pursuits.

PEST CONTROL

In our region which abounds with bird life, we need to put nets over our vines. This is done as soon as we notice the colour change in the Pinot Noir. This usually occurs in mid-January.   Kangaroos are usually not a problem.
We have an insectarium planted through the centre of the property which provides a refuge and encourages beneficial insects to the vineyard that predate on unwelcome anthropods (pests!), maximising biological control measures within the vineyard.

IN THE WINERY

All the wines are made on site in our rammed earth winery.  From a very modest 20 tonne winery set up in 1987, we now have a more sophisticated 200 tonne facility with a small but high-quality press and an excellent destemmer.  Since 2006 we have had the facility to chill fruit in a refrigerated facility, which has been particularly beneficial with the warmer climate and earlier vintages we have been experiencing over recent years.  In the winery, the emphasis is on gentle winemaking methods, avoiding mechanical transfers and with some quality control where we believe this is important.

For the white wines the freshly picked whole bunches are gravity fed into the press where a gentle press program is used to separate the juice from the skins, pips and stems. The (cloudy) juice from the press is not settled but transferred directly to oak barriques and puncheons where fermentation occurs naturally. Local wild yeasts effect the primary ferment, and the wine remains on lees and unsulphured until it is assembled for final treatments such as fining before bottling. Depending on the season, a natural malolactic fermentation usually takes place in barrel.

For the red wines (including the Pinot Gris on Skins), the whole bunches of grapes are cooled and (usually*) destemmed but not crushed, and dropped directly into our two tonne open fermenters, thus avoiding the need to pump must. After four to six days of maceration, the wild yeasts from the vineyard and winery start the alcoholic fermentation. This takes about a week to complete with the temperature peaking at about 34º centigrade.

The wine spends up to a week on skins post fermentation before 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, and for this reason, the wine sees minimal SO2 during the maturation period. The wine is racked only once when it is assembled and prepared for bottling, usually in January the following year

*The Garden Vineyard Pinot Noir and the McIntyre Shiraz are whole bunch fermented, so no destemming here.