Winery & Vintage Info
Woodlands vineyard was established in 1973 by David & Heather Watson and was one of the first five vineyards to be planted in the Margaret River Wine Region. David and Heather aimed to create wines to emulate the great vineyards of Bordeaux.
Woodlands produces wines from its two vineyards, both located in the Wilyabrup Valley. The original vineyard is located on Caves Rd, while the Woodlands Brook Vineyard is located just two kilometres away to the northeast.
Woodlands Vineyard is dry grown and maintained by hand using traditional and biodynamic methods. Attention in the vineyard includes hand weeding, cane pruning, bunch thinning and hand picking. Woodlands Cabernet Sauvignon is rated ‘Outstanding’ on the Langton’s Classification of Fine Wines.
The 2018 growing season was absolutely ideal, and will certainly go down in history as one of Margaret River’s greatest. After very good rainfalls in the beginning of the growing season, flowering conditions were near-perfect, and this great weather persisted from mid-December all the way through to the end of harvest.
Our 2018 Wilyabrup Valley was harvested between 13 March and 9 April in sunny clear conditions. Once harvested the fruit was destemmed and mechanically sorted by our gravity fed system, then hand sorted over a vibrating sorting table berry by berry. Fermentation went well with fantastic extraction of tannin and flavour, with the various batches spending between 7 and 21 days on skins.
Our 2018 Wilyabrup Valley blend comprises 54% Cabernet Sauvignon, 31% Merlot, 8% Malbec, 6% Cabernet Franc, and 1% Petit Verdot. It has matured in French oak for 14 months, where 5% of the barrels used were new.
