Allinda Winery

Great wines start in the vineyard. At Allinda, we have a very small vineyard of only 8 acres, so it makes sense to do what ever it takes to grow excellent fruit. This started with using Cabernet, Chardonnay and Riesling clones sourced from local vineyards that had a proven record for producing quality fruit in this climate. The importance of crop levels, vigour control and fruit exposure to optimum fruit quality have been well proven. At Allinda the Scott Henry trellis system is used. Whilst this system is one of the most expensive to set up and to maintain, when used correctly it does, without doubt, optimise fruit quality. Sustainability has become a buzzword in society. Arguably, this concept is more critical in agriculture than almost any other industry. Firstly, because the goods it produces we ingest on a daily basis! Secondly, Australian agricultural land is very old and delicate and requires excellent stewardship if it is to be passed on to future generations without being degraded. At Allinda, we have put much resource into biological farming practices based on the principles of Elaine Ingham (see details at www.soilfoodweb.com.au). We use compost teas to ensure a healthy and diverse range of soil organisms. We make sure that their populations thrive by applying fish oil, seaweed extract and humates regularly. We do not use pecticides or herbicides (other than organic pine oil) in the vineyard. Clover, used as a living mulch, not only minimises weed growth, insulates soil from temperature extremes and reduces moisture loss from the soil, it also fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere, meaning that we not use fertilisers, other than for trace elements. To ensure optimum fruit quality year-in-year-out, we cannot dispense with all fungicides. We have a carefully managed program to minimise their use, but we consider that it would be detrimental to fruit, and therefore wine quality to abolish a critical part of our tool bag for the sake of pursuing an organic ideology to a detrimental extreme.