If you’ve ever walked through the Adelaide Botanic Gardens close to the National Wine Centre, you’ll have seen the tiny vineyard housed within. And when we say tiny, we mean tiny. The yield would be impossibly small considering that the rough state is 1kg of grapes makes one bottle of wine. There would barely be an acre in that patch, so they might have 2 or 3 tonnes of grapes at most…
Anyway, that’s all for the winemakers at Jacob’s Creek to worry about now when they take the reigns on a partnership with the National Wine Centre to turn what’s there into two limited edition wines to be launched this September.
It’s quite likely this will be the world’s first wine produced solely from grapes grown within a botanic garden. And they’re going to have three cracks at the cherry, with a partnership locked in until 2018, so we might see 3 vintages. Key word being maybe because any wine maker will tell you that not every vintage is ideal. Regardless, to be able to cultivate a crop, ferment the grapes and transform what that little vineyard has been producing in the CBD for years into a bottle for people to own and drink should get tongues wagging amongst local wine collectors.
“We created two ‘field blends’, which involves combining different varieties of grapes in the vineyard as we harvest them and then fermenting them together,” explains Jacob’s Creek Vineyard Manager Tim McCarthy. “It’s an unusual way of making wine and it adds and extra element of challenge, but also excitement.”
The wine’s name and label will be revealed when it is officially launched at the National Wine Centre on September 14. Until then, we can only speculate what the flavours might combine to be, but above all else they’ll be the ONLY flavours that are truly representative of Adelaide as a city. And that’s worth trying.
For more of what’s coming up at the National Wine Centre, visit their website or follow them on Facebook.
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