Our spectacular summer of 08 has simply turned, ever so gently, into a superb vintage 08. Temperate days 21-27°c cool nights 5—8°c and NO RAIN is making picking currently stress free. We’re approximately 7 days earlier than normal commencing on the 20th March with our first grapes for The James Randall, 5t/Ha handpicked Sauvignon Blanc which is looking fantastic. It’s all very exciting—now all we have to do is not mess it up in the making and you should enjoy another great Forrest vintage.

Vintage is now over for us here at Forrest Estate and all our fruit has been processed, our vintage started in earnest on the 20th March 2008, approximately 7 days earlier than normal with hand picked Sauvignon Blanc for the ‘James Randall’ which looked fantastic. The vintage came to a finish on the evening of Monday 13th April to the delight of our dedicated vineyard team who celebrated with some cold beers. John, Brigid and the team were able to sleep very well that night as 70mm of rain fell in the valley, one could call it good planning by John and Tim his vineyard manager.

Press reports of a challenging 2008 grape harvest that overwhelmed wineries are rife, tales of crop left unpicked on the vines due to lack of processing space creating a ‘Sea of Sauvignon’ have been appearing on websites for the last few days, none of this has been a problem for Forrest Estate for a few good reasons including our philosophy to be self reliant in all areas of making wine from vineyard to winery.

A majority of our fruit comes from Estate owned land from Marlborough’s premium Wairau Valleys free draining soils , importantly helping to ensure a low cropping of 6-10 tonnes per hectare this added to being 100% self reliant from picking through to processing has meant a vintage exactly to expectation and above expected quality.

John Commented “Having complete control of the vineyard and winery this vintage in particular was imperative in the final batch of the fruit being brought into the winery on Monday 13th April as pre-planned by myself and Tim” John added “not relying on contract growers and contract pickers and owning our own machine harvester allowed us to manage the yield and act quickly when necessary as the weather turned ensuring clean fruit with fantastic varietal flavours”.

In keeping with John and Brigids pioneering outlook this year sees more exciting additions in the winery from new yeast trials to new varietals such as Arneis, an Italian variety traditionally from Piedmont which creates elegant white wines with peach and almond aromas.

So the ‘Challenging’ all our fruit is now in and we are excited by the quality of this fruit and the potential of the 08 vintage, our tonnage is as per usual by choice meaning we will not compromise on quality, so all we have to do now is let John and his winemaking team do their thing.

We look very much forward to tasting the new wines with you at the earliest convenience and hope you enjoy them as much as we expect.