Saturday, January 03, 2009

The New Year

Not much out of the ordinary is happening at this time of year.
Farm duties are somewhat mundane with a continued weed spraying project, rotation of the cattle into various paddocks to keep the grass down, vegetable garden tending and of course vine spraying and green pruning.
There has also been plenty of reading, beach walking and sports viewing going on.
And there has already been a little bit of wine drinking as you can see from the side bar.
I mentioned there that the Brokenwood Graveyard Shiraz 2002 was outstanding. We had this with a special New Years Eve meal. A wine buff should chase down a bottle or two of this.
http://www.brokenwood.com.au/wines/
I am happy with most of the 2008 vintage. The Pinot Noir is excellent, the Semillon passable and the Cabernet Sauvignon is still very young but has potential. We "lost" the Tempranillo rose' to oxidation. If all goes well I will be entering one or two of these wines in the Milton Show in March.
The 2009 vintage will be on us soon enough!

Summer has been a strange mixture on the south coast so far with hot steamy days followed by a succession of really cool ones and plenty of rain. I don't think I have seen the area greener for over a decade.
We have had a few good thunderstorms with spectacular displays of lightning and sometimes simultaneous wall shaking thunder. These have kept the water tanks full.
I had a wander around the garden today to see what flower pictures I could take to put in this entry. Not a lot around. One plant in flower however is a wild passion fruit. It has hundreds of buds. I put the camera on macro and managed to capture a bee coming in for a landing on one of its blooms.
And above is a pic after a thunderstorm a few days ago taken late afternoon from our front veranda.
Hopefully the pot at this rainbow's end contained a little bit of gold for us all in 2009.

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