Lumen Waite 100 - Flipbook - Page 18
WORDS › KATIE SPAIN | PICTURES › KELSEY ZAFIRIDIS
Harvesting
knowledge
Harvest is a crucial part of every
winemaker and viticulturist’s year.
Meet the team of staff and students
who tackled the 2024 vintage at Waite.
It’s 7am on a Wednesday and quiet chatter can be heard
emanating from the Waite campus’s Coombe Vineyard. It’s
harvest time and the anticipation is audible.
A group of third-year and postgraduate Viticulture and
Oenology students are onsite, carefully picking Semillon.
Confident hands make deft work of snips, dropping
bunches of grapes into buckets as they meticulously move
through the rows. Some of these bunched beauties are
destined to make their way into brandy, others into wine.
The one-and-a-half-hectare vineyard is home to a mix
of varieties, each handpicked by students when the time
is right. Mother Nature calls the shots but, fortunately,
today is relatively mild and the students have been hard
at work for hours.
Jill Bauer, a Lecturer and Senior Winemaker at Waite, is
here to oversee proceedings. She says there’s no time like
vintage. “It’s always exciting,” Jill says. “I love the hope and
the enterprise that vintage brings.”
When the fruit is picked, it makes its way to the winery,
where students are split into groups of four to turn their
designated variety into wine. There’s plenty on offer.
The Waite vineyard is primarily home to reds, including
Shiraz, Grenache and Mataro. There’s also Tempranillo,
Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Touriga, and Tinta Armarela.
Whites such as Chardonnay, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc
and Semillon are also grown here, along with a small block
home to a “fruit salad” of 30-plus varieties.
“We are working on assessing what we have in our versatile
mix and are planting some more emerging varieties, like
Barbera, Fiano, and Sangiovese,” says Jill. What can’t be
picked onsite is sourced from growers in regions including
McLaren Vale, Clare Valley, Adelaide Hills, Barossa Valley,
and Langhorne Creek. “The fruit that we source from off
campus offers diversity,” she says.
With the excitement of harvest, though, comes
trepidation – especially so at the Waite winery, says Jill.
“Most wineries don’t have 60 to 80 new young
winemakers coming in to work on their cellar floor,” she
says. “It’s a bit like having 80 people come into your house
to stay for a while.”
Such mixed emotions are normal.
“I think any winemaker feels that,” Jill says. “There’s so
much on the line. The season and the weather are out of
your control and you can’t predict a lot of what happens.
Here, you have the added complexity of dozens of different
people in the building – whether it’s researchers, students,
academics, growers or customers. It makes for many
different push-pull personalities.”
Practical experience, like the kind offered in the vineyard
today, is essential for producing well-rounded students and
future winemakers.
“I believe it is everything,” Jill says. “We’re all down here
getting our hands dirty. I’m just as likely to be sweeping the
floor and shovelling grapes as I will be cleaning out a press.
Students need to see how hands on it is especially in small
batch fermentations.”
A diverse crew of international and local students
adds to the excitement. Students from Canada, Belgium,
Netherlands, US, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong work
together in classrooms, the vineyard, and the winery.
Among them is Delphine Derache, who moved from her
homeland of Belgium to enrol in a Master of Viticulture
and Oenology at the University of Adelaide.
18
