Winery & Vintage Info
Petaluma wines bottled under the trademark 'Yellow Label' of Petaluma are testimony to our distinguished vineyard philosophy, heritage and pioneering spirit. They showcase our primary goal of making wine crafted from the best fruit grown in the right vineyard sites for each variety.
The winter of 2016 was incredibly wet and the spring that followed was a record-breaker, with enormous rainfall and widespread flooding across southern Australia. On the 30th of September the whole state of South Australia was plunged into darkness when freak storms hit the state and then Victoria, shutting down all power from the Victorian interconnector. Some towns went without power for over a week.
As a result of this crazy, wet wild spring, the old vines on Hanlin Hill, planted in 1968 on the eastern slopes of the Clare Valley, woke from their winter slumber later than for the last fifteen years and we started picking in March, more like the vintages of the seventies and eighties.
The vineyard received 1846OC days of heat, versus the long term average of 1773OC days, but again this heat accumulation is skewed by April’s weather, by which all fruit had been picked.
We started hand picking in beautiful cool autumn sunshine on the 6th of March and finished ten days later. The fruit was transported to our winery near Woodside in the Adelaide Hills where it was de-stemmed, crushed and chilled into tank presses for juice extraction. Only the finest free run juice is used for Petaluma Riesling.
The pristine juice was then held cold in stainless steel tanks and the partially clarified juice was then inoculated with a chosen yeast strain to conduct the primary (alcoholic) fermentation. These ferments lasted between four and eight weeks.
At sugar dryness the cloudy wines were chilled to -2OC and allowed to gently clarify by cold settling before filtration and bottling in Spring 2017.
The Hanlin Hill Vineyard is planted on predominantly red-brown loam over slate and is up to 550 metres above sea level. This vineyard has produced a very full flavoured dry slatey mineral Riesling, since the style first emerged with the first Riesling from Hanlin Hill in 1979. Winery Notes
