It’s not a word to set the heart racing, but winemakers in more variable climates around the world would kill for the ‘normal’ conditions that Tim Lovett outlines when describing Margaret River’s 2025 vintage. The senior winemaker at Leeuwin Estate tells of ‘generous rainfall in winter’ and ‘modest warmth throughout the growing season’. ‘Summer so far has been delightful, with no extremely hot days,’ adds viticulturalist David Winstanley.

The main challenge, in fact, has come from an external – and uninvited – source. ‘We’re in the forest here, and we have a little bird called the silvereye,’ says Winstanley. ‘Usually it feeds on a blossom in the Marri tree, but unfortunately, after flowering massively last year, this year it’s not flowering at all. So the silvereyes are going for the grapes instead.’

As a result, he says, everyone across the region has been busy netting their vineyards – if they hadn’t already. ‘There’s always pressure from other species of birds, so we always net. Plus one heavy rainstorm could take out all the buds.’ 

The harvesting of the first parcels – Pinot Noir for Leeuwin’s sparkling wine from its older, low-yielding, dry-grown vineyards – started on February 6th, on a par with standard picking dates. ‘That’s all in the winery, to process and do winery things with, so it’s their problem now,’ says Winstanley. What type of things, exactly? ‘For sparkling wine,’ says Lovett, ‘we don’t want anything that is too fruit-driven, or that has more phenolic capacity. So we’ve been doing some light finings on the Pinot juice, just to take away some slight edginess on the mid to back palate.’

Winstanley has already moved onto the next component. ‘This week (w/c Feb 10th) is a busy one for us,’ he says, ‘testing and tasting lots of samples from the Chardonnay vineyards. We’re a relatively large estate, and there’s a lot of blocks that we need to have a look at and see how they’re going. So we head out with a pair of secateurs and a bucket and then bring everything back to the winery to take readings.’ 

This is what he calls ‘the wine chemistry side of things’ – checking the pH, the TA (tartaric acidity) and the brix (sugar levels) of the samples. ‘That’s just background stuff though,’ he points out. ‘The real call to pick comes from Tim and myself and Phil [Hutchinson, winemaker] heading out into the vineyard and tasting the fruit.’

‘Numbers are only a guide,’ agrees Lovett. ‘Ultimately, everything is about what David, Phil and I taste out in the paddock. So for the Block 20 Chardonnay, which is a backbone of the Art Series cuvée, we’re picking on a fruit spectrum of pear, cut lime and nectarine. As soon as we start to see that in the grapes, then we start to be really engaged. And then, when we’ve got numbers to back that up, we know we’re good to go.’ 

Such an exercise isn’t always as clearcut as it may seem. ‘I’ve always been a splitter, not a lumper,’ says Winstanley. Sorry? ‘I’ve always been of the mind that we should split blocks up if we need to, rather than lump them together as one sample. So when we’re doing classification [deciding which parcels go into which wine], we might think that half of that block, or that patch over there isn’t quite right, and we don’t want to compromise on quality. It does mean, though, that we can end up with a lot of wines to classify…’

In general though, things are looking promising for 2025, he says. ‘But it’s not in till it’s all in – and between now and the end of April, anything can happen…’

Leeuwin Estate will be hosting a masterclass at the London Club on the evening of Monday 28th April – more details to follow

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IN

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