Harvest halved in tough conditions

Ian Burns with some of the sparkling grapes picked earlier this month.

After a challenging season, Oxberry Vineyard at Waterhouse is celebrating 10 years since the first harvest for owners Kylie Hall and Ian Burns.

The only vineyard has just completed two days of picking its sparkling and pinot fruit, about a month later than in a typical season and recording a significant drop in volume.

“We pick the sparkling first because the fruit doesn’t need to be quite as ripe and that is usually done in mid-March and normally we pick the pinot about two weeks after that. But this year we did the sparkling on Monday, April 13 and then picked the pinot four days later because the warm weather we have finally had ensured the fruit ripened very quickly,” Ms Hall said.

“This season most vineyards are down because of the weather. It was really slow to warm up and the wind battered the vines through spring so we didn’t get a lot of flowering and the flowers we did get weren’t able to set properly. The conditions didn’t allow the fruit to grow into the size and volume they normally would.

“We thought we’d be down by 30 per cent but it is more like 50 per cent of volume.”

It’s a drastic change from the past two years for the vineyard which has 2.5acres under vines. 

“The last two years have been bumper crops of over four tonnes but this year it is about two tonnes which will equate to about 2000 bottles,” she said.

“The positive spin is that it is a good boutique vintage that will be hard to get your hands on. We think it will be delicious wine because when you can eat a bunch straight off the vine and they taste delicious, the bottled product will be pretty delicious too.”

Oxberry produces sparkling wine from chardonnay fruit as well as pinot and rosé wines from the pinot vines and it is made by winemaker Shane Holloway at Delamere near Pipers River with the 2026 vintage to be ready for consumption in the next six-12 months.

Ms Hall said attention now turned to fertilising before pruning.

“We are not organic but we operate on minimum spray so we are currently fertilising with a Seasol fertiliser and we have geese in the vineyard to keep the bugs and snails down,” she said.

An experiment growing sauvignon blanc vines has not been successful and after winter they will begin the process of grafting chardonnay cuttings onto the sauvignon blanc vines.

The hope is to have enough chardonnay grapes in the future to make a standalone chardonnay.

Developing a vineyard has been a steep learning curve over the last decade, she said.

“Our first vintage was 2016 which was only really small and then in 2017 we had a really late frost in November and we lost most of the crop. It looked like a fire had gone through because everything was just dead,” she said.

“But since 2018 we have been producing sparkling and pinot and we introduced the rosé  in 2023.

“We are still learning how to manage the wildlife. The possums were a big problem early on but we have added additional electric fencing to help with that.

“We are primarily beef farmers with our Angus cattle but we love producing wine varieties that we love.”

 Kylie Hall enjoying the harvest at Oxberry Estate.