News and Views

Printhie Wine Week events - Book now!!

Orange Wine Week is on again this month from Saturday 18th - Sunday 26th October. We are again hosting the Blending Challenge this year due to the popularity of the event with many teams returning to challenge again. We also have a wonderful dinner planned at The Old Convent where we will be hosting members of the Trans Tasman winning NSW Swifts Netball team.

Bookings are filling fast so book now to enjoy the events.

Printhie Blending Challenge

Join us for lunch and an afternoon of wine blending with glass in hand. Enjoy the challenge of blending different wine components direct from barrel while competing against other teams to create the winning wine. Once you have had time to enjoy lunch and mix-and-match a number of blends each team will be required to submit one wine for judging
So come along and challenge the other teams for your chance to reign supreme.

Saturday 18 + Saturday 25
12 Noon
$45pp Bookings essential
(02) 6366 8422

Printhie Ladies Lunch @ The Old Convent

Join us for a long lunch with special guests from the NSW Swift’s netball team including illustrious coach Julie Fitzgerald. As proud sponsors of the NSW Swifts we would like to invite you to an afternoon of fine wine and food while gaining an insight into the world of Australian elite women’s sport.

Thursday 23
12 Noon
$65pp Bookings essential
(02) 6366 8422

Printhie wins gold in NZ

We recently decided to enter the NZ International Wine Show as a way of benchmarking our products against the Kiwi's and other cool climate producers. We are please to announce they showed very well with our 2006 Mountain Range Merlot winning a gold medal. Five bronze medals were also awarded, this meant every wine we sent received a medal.

Drew selected in Len Evans Tutorial

Printhie would like to congratulate our winemaker Drew Tuckwell on his selection in the 2008 Len Evans Tutorial. James Halliday describes it as "the most exclusive wine school in the world". Each year the Len Evans Foundation Trustees invite wine scholars to participate in the Len Evans Tutorial. Over a five-day period the 12 scholars are exposed to the great wines of the world, young and old. There are blind tastings each morning of 30 varietal wines from up to five countries and spanning up to 30 years. The wines are judged as if they were in an Australian wine show. There are four Masterclass sessions ranging from flights of Bordeaux and Prestige Champagne to the final class of the week, Domaine De La Romanee Conti. Evenings consist of more great wines of the world presented as brackets or as Option wines.

Please click here to download the winelist for the week. For those who know their world wines you will see why selection into such an elite club is highly competitive.

The winemakers diary - August 2008

Oh! Thank the lord the rain has arrived! Just when we were getting more than a little desperate that there would not be enough soil moisture to support good growth during budburst, the heavens opened up in September. We have had at least 100mm of rain during September at the winery and the vineyards higher up the slopes of Mt Canobolas would have had significantly more.

We are overjoyed and in celebration that Dave went and got the tractor bogged down to its axle – proof enough that there is good soil moisture. And right on cue the vines began to burst and the vineyard now has a vibrant green strip running down the length of the trellis.

Farmers being farmers we need something new to worry about so we will worry about frost. If temperatures drop below freezing overnight it will freeze and burn the tender young shoots and cause irreparable damage causing crop loss. There have been a few nights that have come close but given our advantageous site selection – all our vineyards are on slopes – the cold air usually drains away and the Printhie vineyards have never suffered significant frost damage – touch wood!

Back in the winery, the 2008 Pinot Gris has recently been bottled and got its first public showing at Taste Orange @ Bondi. The response has been great and we really look forward to this wine reaching the lunch table over summer.

In Sydney we had a great time promoting Printhie in Sydney during the Orange @ Bondi week. The Tom Dunne Gallery in Darlinghurst was a spectacular setting for our trade and public tastings. We had a great dinner at Blue Orange restaurant in Bondi. We saw hundreds of enthusiastic wine lovers at the Kemeny's tastings in Bondi and hundreds more at Bondi Pavilion on the Sunday. Thank you to everyone who came along and supported Printhie and the Orange region. Hope you enjoyed the wines and check out stocklist list to see where you can buy Printhie or just contact the winery direct.

Cheers
Drew Tuckwell
Winemaker

Wine feature - Pinot Noir

Pinot Noir – the holy grail of grape varieties. Tricky in the vineyard, tricky in the winery, usually expensive to make, difficult to make at a budget price, absolutely sublime when everything falls into place.

Originating in Burgundy, central France, there is no doubting that this region remains its spiritual home and continues to produce the greatest examples of the variety. But very few of us can afford those – we are talking hundreds of dollars a bottle. Pinot is now grown extensively in Australia, New Zealand and the north-west of the USA (California/Oregon). There are pockets of it grown in most wine producing countries around the world. There is hardly a winemaker anywhere that has not been tempted by the challenge of pinot noir.

Pinot noir is usually lighter in colour than most red wine varieties. It does not usually produce a blockbuster style of wine. It is fragrant, somewhat delicate in its perfume but can be highly complex and intriguing. It can take on some earthy, forest floor characters adding further complexity. The palate texture is usually a big part of its attraction, especially as it matures. It is not necessarily a feeble wine and can have quite a firm structure and silky tannins – the oft heard quite is “an iron fist in a velvet glove”.

The Orange region has the potential to do very well with pinot noir. Pinot can excel when it is grown on the warm side of a marginal climate and the higher slopes of Mt Canobolas provide exactly this type of growing environment. Printhie sources its fruit from vineyards at 1,000m elevation and over – about as high as they go in Orange. We have been very pleased with the fruit expression in our previous pinot releases and with a couple of years in the bottle they develop some lovely complexity. We are still evolving the style of pinot we are producing. It’s a little project we have in the winery and every year we tinker a little bit in an attempt to make better, more complex wines.

The 2007 Mt Canobolas Collection is about to be released. It retains the typical fruit purity of Printhie pinots but we it has gained a little in depth and complexity. It is drinking beautifully now and will develop nicely over the next three years or so. The 2008 vintage saw a little more tinkering and the quest continues, the search for the holy grail.

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