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NEWSLETTERS | Classic Clippings
BUDBURST 1991
Contents :
1989 Cabernet Sauvignon - The Label
Dieter Engler's landscape impression of our valley, used for our 1989 Cabernet Sauvignon.
This is the second in our Gallery Series, in which we invite a local artist to produce an impressionist landscape of Polish Hill River, for use on the label of our Cabernet Sauvignon. The artist is Dieter Engler from Clare, and in superficial analysis, has chosen to depict the vineyard, hills and gullies of the valley, and the ruins of the settlers cottages.
Less definable is the mood that the artist has captured; a mood that some find depressing, and conveying a sense of desolation and despair.
Yet this is a concept of mood that Engler himself is quite comfortable with, acknowledging that he sees Australia as a hard country to tame. The settlers tried to hack a European environment out of a virgin landscape, and tried to reproduce close settlement with each family having only a small holding that was not sustainable in the less fertile soils: "yet in the end", Engler notes with a wry grin, "the land won."
Does it really matter that our vineyard faces east; or north, south, or west, for that matter?
Sunshine is important to the ripening grape, yet too much heat and too much sunshine will produce grapes of poor quality, whilst not enough heat and sunshine, and they will not ripen.
If we were growing grapes in Tasmania or Wales, we would be trying to collect every last ray of sunshine, but that is not the case in Clare.
The valley of Polish Hill River runs north-south, and is flanked by a high ridge to the west, that shades our vineyard from the last 30 minutes of the harsh afternoon sun each day. Add all those 30 minutes over the 100 day ripening period, and it is easy to see why grapes at Polish Hill River can ripen up to 3 weeks later than the vines on the other side of the hill.