S P R I N G W I N E S :
In better news than last weeks frosted nightmare….we have a bunch of new young fruitful wines to share!
2025 PATSY fiano
2025 AMBER pecorino / fiano
2025 SIMONE cabernet rosé
2025 FLOYD nero d’avola
2025 HITCH sangiovese
2025 XO PETILLANT NATUREL
Textural and skin contact whites, rosés, chilled / light reds and good time fizz for lifting moods and crushing thirsts all summer long!
Out now online and in cellar door!
For wholesale customers:
VIC METRO & GEELONG: Ryan and Ed from @viticult_ are currently painting melbourne with the minim rainbow @thebigk__ and @edwin_squires
VIC REGION: direct with us. Tom is on the road and would love to see you!
QLD: in the safe hands of @corkandco and available from next week with @loganm00re and @almitra_corkandco and the team!
A genuinely lovely release this one. Get in touch quick as they usually dont last long into the new year.
Xo
FROSTED.
For the second time this year at Metcalfe. Here’s what it looks like. Looking like around 80% loss across our higher yielding Syrah block and the primo Riesling rows. About 8t of grapes we won’t see in 2026.
We’ve had a big frost before in 2020…but 2 in a year is wild. This feels like a pretty thorough and big event. Heartbreaking walking through the vines at this time of year and not seeing verdant young shoots dancing in the morning light. Just withered brown.
Farming is hard. Respect the growers
XO
Another huge late frost for us at Metcalfe. Twice in one year is a new shitty milestone for us. Sending out heaps of love to all the grape growers….sometimes it really sucks! The deepest of respect to winemakers who grow their own grapes….particularly this year. Seems like everyone is getting hit! #Growyourown
F A R A D A Y :
First bud burst for us at our new Faraday vineyard, but 47th for these old Chardonnay vines! Watching new life unfurl from these gnarly old trunks is special moment.
A huge amount of work to do out here, but these old grape trees reach their roots deep into the sandy granite of this hill and have a hell of a lot of life left in them. Soil sampling and pruning to low bud numbers before we work out what to feed them. This site has seen no synthetic applications for 7 years which is a great place to start out regenerative approach to farming here.
A lot of old wood to cut out of the Syrah and Pinot. All spur pruned for decades, with cordon wires enveloped in old spurs. That’s going to utterly suck to fix and take years to complete. But you know….just keep going!
A shot of the 2024 Faraday methode ancestral laying in bins in preparation for disgorgement ahead of a Christmas release! This wine is a big part of our absurd reasoning to take on this challenging project!
Anyway, love ya! Farming rules. Get out and visit vineyards xxoo
X O W I N T E R R E L E A S E ! !
This is a big one for us. The full lineup of wines farmed, made and bottled by T.Sproal and B.Alford…as it proudly states on the back label:
2024 MINIM XO Petilliant Naturel
2023 MINIM XO Riesling
2023 MINIM XO Grenache
2024 MINIM XO New Small Rouge
2023 MINIM XO Cabernet Sauvignon
2023 MINIM XO Syrah
We’ve finally arrived at this spot of having the full suite of XO wines out together and telling the stories we want to tell about the vineyard and our farming. Sounds twee and earnest but we’ve really taken about 4 years to improve the vine and soil health such that we can get those canopies to hold long enough to hang that fruit long and deepen our exploration of flavour. Wine styles too…you really need to explore things to understand how to express a site and the grapes you’ve got to work with. It’s slow going. 2023 was the year that really opened our eyes and revealed what those vines can do.
Anyway, here’s the wines….an expression of collected learnings, patience and hard graft with just the right amount of dogma and hopefully a good serving of ’shit that’s actually a pretty serious cabernet’!
Can’t wait to get them out into the world. There’s some words to say here. Feels great to so proudly stand behind a suite of wines that you’ve talked about forever and most importantly coaxed from soil to bottle.
In Melbourne with @viticult_ from next week.
Thanks
XO
2021 XO RIESLING…
It’s my favourite wine of all my wines. It’s a wine that I’ve wanted more than anything to share with all those legendary natural winemakers that fuelled my fires in the early 2010s. I’m deeply satisfied and immensely proud of this one and so very grateful for all the amazing comments and conversations that it has given life too. I definitely also don’t care about your opinions on natural wine.
Bugger all of it left…with the 2023 release ready to meet the world. Thanks for the good times, can’t wait to share the new expression…with just a hint more skin contact and blessed by queen @thepocket_rocket !!
XO
WAITING FOR GRAPES…
It’s got the bones of a bit of a wild year. No water, small berries, heaps of colour early….flavour building, still low sugar, acid holding for now….it looked ripe in the vineyard but a while off after crushing a sample and running some tests. Narrowing in on a pick date is the big challenge…ripeness manifests very differently year to year.
I lot of emotions. A massive week building next week for sure.
Mostly I just need to calm down.
Send cake. XO
M E T C A L F E :
Being absurdly beautiful and teaming with new spring life and energy. We let the grass grow longer than most, in a few blocks leaving every fifth row grow wild to attract beneficial plants and insects. Brock’s compost teas are going out through the fertigation and everything feels so happy and balanced and green!
A million things could derail us from here but this feels like a great start to the growing season!
Sending love to all the growers!
Tim
xo
#viticilture #organic #regerativefarming #farming #wine
2024 MINIM AMBER - Pecorino, Fiano grown by @chalmerswine in Heathcote
Fruit and skins and sunshine and old barrels and summer and nasi lemak for breakfast with Jem’s epic sambal and @anchovy338 ikan bilis every single day!
xo
