Ben Cane | V25 & Vineyard Notes
Growing Season 2025
Coming off the back of the driest year for rainfall since 1911, we were hopeful of a little more sky juice this year, however the trend continued with a relatively dry year and similar temperatures as to 2024. Regardless, Duke’s Vineyard stood out as we had quite a late budburst to our neighbours due to cooler nighttime temperatures and a fair degree of cooling maritime breezes. We left pruning as late as we could last year to push back budburst past the tricky cooler periods resulting in good steady growth to our vines.
All the work over the last few years of reworking the old vines and laying down fresh younger canes has come to fruition, pardon the pun! We have seen better fruit production giving more—yet smaller—bunches with better light and air penetration through the canopy. Those days of wielding ungainly loppers which hung by a bungy cord off the back of the tractor, cutting through the vines' canes which had slowly grown around and consumed the wire and were the size of my bicep, were totally worth it! Remarking to Sarah early in 2025, I finally feel like the vineyard is ours, having almost completed the reworking program I started in 2022. It's amazing how this engages us each day as we are shaping our own future with every vine we touch.
The season progressed steadily with higher rainfall in August than what has been typical, but a very dry December through February coupled with warm, dry windy conditions pushed ripeness ahead without the extreme heat spikes of 2024. With only one pass of shoot thinning the vines, we were set up for a great season. Yields were healthy and the fruit progressed steadily. Then the cyclones hit the east coast...
Harvest started off the mark early (though still a month later than 2024) for the wonderful Victory Point Chardonnay. Picked on February 26th, it was picture perfect. Yours truly did his traditional pilgrimage in the removalist van full of empty bins the night before the pick. Picking in the sweaty heat, once again the great team at VP expertly got the bunches off and I managed to deliver them safely after many hours in the van, to the waiting cool relief of the reefer container at Castle Rock where the fruit chilled close to 0 degrees before being pressed two days later.
The first Riesling pick was not far behind. Team leader Mehdi and his great crew helped us handpick Block 5 on March 2nd bringing in delicious fruit with plenty of verve and zing. To counterbalance the fine boned handpicked section, we gently machine harvested the second lot on the 13th of March, whipping the fruit off very early in the morning (starting in the cool hour of 5 AM) and delivering it immediately to the press at Castle Rock. The aim was to have the delicate, floral and refined components that show as a result of handpicking, to be balanced with the richer and fleshier element of the machine harvested lot, presenting many layers and complexity. And I'm happy to tell you that I think it worked a treat.
Then came the threat of rain. Tropical typhoons hitting the east coast coincided with our very first estate Pinot Noir pick. We grafted a hectare of Shiraz over to Pinot at the end of 2024 and were excited to harvest what we thought might be 1.5 to 2 tonnes of fruit: three different clones of delicious-looking, perfect pine cone-shaped bunches.
This was an epic occasion 26 years in the making. My love affair with Pinot began in 1999 during my first vintage—at Arcadian Wines in Santa Barbara, California; this was closely followed by my first visit to Burgundy, a trip which totally wrecked me for the rest of my life by sucking me into a lifelong affair with this heartbreaking grape (more detail of this later); and here I was on the verge of harvesting the first Pinot from our estate vineyard with one of the wildest storms ever seen in the area bearing down on us. The fruit was perfect, literally what you see as an illustration in a textbook when you look up "Pinot Noir." And a major storm was threatening to destroy the lot and derail us in achieving the tantilising milestone.
The rain hit that evening and it was incredible. 160mm of rain in four hours! It was like being in a tropical monsoon at my mother’s house in Far North Queensland, watching water flow in rivers around the garden and off the roof of the house in a waterfall, all the time thinking, what the hell! I called Mehdi at 8.30PM and discussed whether to call off the pick. He simply asked me, “Does the fruit look perfect?”
"Yes."
"Do you want to risk the vines taking up all this rain coming and dilute what we have worked so hard for across that year?"
"No. Mehdi, you are right. Let's go for it."
The forecast for the morning looked good.
We arose to a perfect dawn; the clouds parted and the morning sun revealed glistening fruit of fantastic quality. Everyone got stuck in, the fruit was all picked, and we ended up with 3 tonnes! We were giddy with delight. And that amount would give me enough fruit to experiment working with a portion as foot-stomped whole bunches.
Then I decided to try to drive the forklift to the loading site at the south end of the vineyard through the newly grafted rows of Chardonnay via a path which normally is firm and fine. Not today, after all that rain! As I was driving along the path, and just as I was thinking that maybe this was not a great idea, I felt the tyre sink and the forklift rolled dramatically to one side.
Chaos ensued.
We tried to tow it out with a tractor, but the forklift was tilted so perilously that it threatened to roll over completely. The next option was to put the forks on the tractor, except that takes about 45 minutes to do. Mike the vineyard manager set to work on that and I went to help pick Shiraz and try to keep up with the crew. A Fawlty Towers-type scenario was unfolding with the new crew that were depositing fruit into bins on the ground which presented a problem now that we had no forklift.
Eventually, two tractors, three men plus me (wearing my motorcycle helmet in lieu of a hardhat), and four old railroad sleepers later, the forklift was sucked out of the mud and back in action. One of the sleepers vanished into the mud forever.
It dawned on me that there was an equally farcical drama around the 2024 Pemberton Pinot harvest that involved a busted trailer full of grapes, out in the sticks, in the middle of the night. Ask us for the full story next time you visit the Cellar Door! The way both harvests unfolded was unmistakably a Pinot Noir thing—living up to the "heartbreak grape" moniker.
The day progressed and we also handpicked the whole bunch Shiraz which also looked stunning. A triumph in the end, but I will never forget the 17th of March 2025! Through adversity is born beauty… isn’t that what they say?
The strong weather continued with showers and storms which, while you may think would give us cause for concern for the red grapes still out there, was actually a godsend as we were literally down to the last puddles of water in the irrigation dams. We had been eking out the water to get us over the line. In this kind of season, there can be a concern that the sugars will continue to rise but the physiological tannins will not keep pace, producing green wines. Therefore the rain was very welcome and actually helped to push the ripeness and tannins along while lowering the sugars.
Ten days later, we brought in the delicious Magpie Hill Shiraz which, like the Pinot, was small bunches offering great concentration and the perfect balance between black pepper and ripe juicy dark berry forest fruit. On the same day, we also picked some Cabernet which showed delicious red cranberry and Ribena characters. That was cold pressed to form the backbone of this year's Single Vineyard Rosé. The Shiraz was so low yielding and concentrated that we decided not to put any of its juice aside for the Rosé this year. We only had to wait another week for the rest of the Cabernet to be ready—filled out into a perfectly ripe expression of cassis and mulberries with silky refined tannins of grace and elegance, yet with explosive power and plushness.
Harvest concluded with the last pick coming in on 4 April, delivering our best vintage yet out of the four we have experienced at Duke's so far: great balance, wonderful ripeness and incredible length for all the varieties, yet early and quite warm. The only downside is that there won’t be much wine to go around! However, we are very much looking forward to seeing how these wines express what was another eventful, action-packed vintage and how they eventually age.
On a daily basis, Sarah and I are incredibly grateful to be the custodians of such a rare and enigmatic site. We have equal gratitude for the small team that works tirelessly in the vineyard and the others we work with at the winery, all of whom help us to fully realise the potential of each great vintage. We hope you enjoy and appreciate these wines forged from the primal elements of the Porongurup, shaped with a gentle and respectful hand, allowing the terroir to be beautifully expressed in their own unique voices, as much as we do.
Cheers!
