Time and Time, Again
Updated: Oct 27
Perhaps as it’s our tenth season of farming, or having harvested our fifth crop, I felt my relationship to our vineyard deepen greatly over the course of this year.
I’ve come to understand our wine, in part, as the relationship between people and place. When there is relationship, to land, to people, there is responsibility. Not burden, but responsibility; a duty to make wine worthy of a place, to honor its potential, the people who live there, the culture, history, the cumulative work.
Recently we had Eben Sadie of Sadie Family Wines in the Swartland and Michael Dhillon of Bindi in the Macedon ranges come and stay at Miao Lu. When tasting fruit together in our vineyard (at about 9% potential alcohol) I asked Eben, at what level of sugar would your grapes be to have this level of phenolic ripeness? He said 16% potential alcohol, which is to say, a level they no longer are able to reach before picking.
Michael and Eben’s wines have given me immense inspiration, but I’ve found equal if not greater admiration in their thoughtfulness and generosity, their clarity of values, the ‘why’ behind all of their decisions, and the depth of understanding they have in the vineyards they farm.
Seeing Miao Lu through Michael and Eben’s eyes and experience helped validate that our relationship of phenolic and flavor ripeness to sugar accumulation is an incredible luxury in today’s climate and increasingly rare, perhaps singular.
Conversations with both growers reinforced my experience that our earlier phenolic ripeness doesn’t necessarily mean we should pick early, even though we certainly can. That with our unique set of circumstances, we have to explore and define the boundaries of picking for ourselves, and for how we want it to serve our wines.
Each of my formative experiences working overseas were at domaines that have had picking dates move up drastically over the course of the past 20 years. With our first small crops in 2022 and 2023, I was taken aback by our early phenolic ripeness at low potential alcohol, with brown seeds and delicious, pure flavors in the fruit. The combination was something I had never encountered and tasted for myself, and while I knew immediately that it was special, I didn’t have an understanding of the possibilities in front of me.
Without realizing, I had internalized some of the thinking around picking and ripeness from other places and the discourse around other wines, and so I picked early and chaptalized.
In retrospect, I can see that I allowed my own fear and anxiety to influence my decisions. The wines we made in 2022 and 23 are delicious and undoubtedly of our place, but they don’t feel fully formed, as though I cut them off mid sentence.
Vinifying grapes from our land for the first time, tasting it as wine and not just fruit, turned what I observed and felt in the vineyard into something tangible and sensory. Experiencing the full life cycle from soil preparation, to planting, farming, then finally into wine, has given me a new level of understanding. My growing familiarity with our vineyard has helped me recognize things I had internalized from other places and wines, and question how those beliefs may not serve our wine.
Since that first crop, I’ve introduced refinements in vineyard and cellar to amplify the character of our site, to make the wine more of what it already is: working towards looser cluster morphology, smaller berries to build inherent intensity and detail in the fruit, how we work with whole clusters, the temperature and length of our fermentations, how we press, how we want our oak to function, how we bottle. It’s become clear that picking and how I thought about its function, was a missing piece in this puzzle.
I can see now that I hadn’t given the fruit the time on the vine it needed to become even more of what it already was, to be able to fully capture how our vineyard feels, a value that informs our other choices in both vineyard and cellar.
William Kelley, tasting my first experiments from 2022, was the first to push me to ask deeper questions about making choices more true to our own place, embracing its points of uniqueness and idiosyncrasy.
This was a lesson I’d already begun to embrace in the vineyard, and William helped me see how it could shape my thinking as a whole, from vineyard, through vinification and into the cellar, but also my entire conception of what our wines could be.
The challenges of our first three seasons (2017-2019) taught me very early that we could not approach our farming as most places do. Our soils, our climate, our altitude presented different realities to those at sea level, to soils with more organic matter, water holding capacity and vigor. The relationship between water, vine and soil was drastically different, with our evapotranspiration rates multiples of vineyards at sea level. We learn from and take inspiration from other growers, but we could not take their approaches and paste them in our place. We learned to listen to and observe our own vineyard, finding the rhythms and details of what it needed, to form the basis of an approach that is entirely our own.
I took my first steps exploring and redefining our window of picking in 2024 and the differences in depth were striking. These were amplified by parallel changes during vinification in how we work with whole clusters and when we break skins during fermentation for red wines as well as how we crush before pressing in white. The evidence in the glass was clear, and spoke directly to my intuition. The experience gave me the confidence to explore further into the possibilities for my own self.
In 2025 I aimed to experiment with small portions of our red and white picked later again. I also was determined to create the conditions in myself to allow for greater serenity amidst the pressures of vintage and choosing picking dates. I knew that I had to be more free of fear in order to have patience to see the experiment through.
The results in 2025 were very much an extension of the year before. There is great strength and continuity of our vineyard’s character, but expanded, with greater detail, layers and facets of that personality emerging from the increased depth and density. I made the decision then not to consider picking until at least 110 days post flowering in 2026.
In each of the past five seasons I have gained an increasingly deeper appreciation that I cannot approach our wine holding beliefs inherited from other places, letting those ideas limit what our wine can be.
In the past, I was imposing the very constraint that our vineyard has given me room to move beyond.
With a slower, less hurried window of how sugar, flavor, phenolics and acidity mature in relation to one another, we have fewer pressures forcing our hand, and more rests on what we make of the opportunity.
I’m learning to let go of the thinking around timing and risks of ripeness I learned elsewhere, no longer letting them define the boundaries of what is possible in my vineyard.
I’ve come to realize that each way of thinking belongs to their own particular places and particular moments in their histories. Many of the growers I learned from have had to respond to profound changes in the conditions they farm.
Picking too late is a possibility in any region, but that window is something we have to continue to understand and define through our own experience, for our own place.
With this in mind, I didn’t even sample until 100 days in 2026. I didn’t see the point of creating the temptation to pick or prompting fear by sampling and seeing numbers. It gave our fruit, particularly the white, more time to build and amplify its inherent qualities.
It’s become clear that picking was the missing piece of the puzzle in how we worked, the link between vineyard and cellar. Though many of our choices in the vineyard and cellar are interconnected, picking is the one true decision that belongs both to the vineyard and vinification.
What have I learned from this process of letting go?
The same reconsideration of picking seems to have amplified the defining qualities in each wine we make. The red’s floral exuberance and the white’s structural presence became more apparent in each of the past three vintages.
The red and white are two sides of the same coin, the yin and yang of our site. Our red is silk and white is stone, one finesse and the other structure. Rethinking how we pick amplified and expanded that sense in both the wines.
I was anxious that pushing as far as we did in this season would compromise qualities I loved in our wines, and instead those qualities emerged with greater clarity.
In our reds, I worried that the intensity of our perfume, with its distinctive yunnan damask rose, might diminish. Instead, that character appeared earlier in our fermentations this year than I’d experienced before, with greater clarity and definition than ever. To me, this validated two things: one, this personality is not a function of when we pick, but is truly a defining part of the vineyard’s personality. Two, that picking can and should be an amplifying choice, just like in everything else we do.
Picked 10 days later this year, our whites came in with 20% more dry extract than our previous record of (an already unusually high) 26.2 g/l. Tasting at the press, our white juice felt immediately more three dimensional. With the same character of fruit as years past, I tasted more of everything, greater density, structure and umami, each element, in both flavor and feeling, turned up further in intensity and detail.
In years past, our few rows of Riesling we grow for ourselves has come in around the same pH and malic as the Chardonnay when picked 5-7 days later. This year when picked 15 days later than the Chardonnay, the Riesling had both lower pH and lower malic. This is too small of a data set to claim causation with absolute certainty, but it makes me think of what William Kelley and Jean Marie Guffens have said to me how white grapes can concentrate acid as well as sugar via transpiration as hang time extends in the right conditions.
In 2027, I’m going to leave a little bit of Chardonnay out until around when we pick the Riesling and see if the correlation holds. I’m curious to see what the results bring and cannot wait to learn from the experience.
In redefining our picking this year, I’m realizing that “earlier” or “later” doesn’t really describe the change in my thinking. Earlier and later are simply temporal descriptors, but the shift in my thinking is less about time and more about in what should guide the decision, picking for our place, our wine, and what we want it to be.
I can now see that I must approach picking with the same intention that guides our other choices: how do we amplify the character of this place? How do we bring out more of its best and most defining qualities? What might we learn about what our place can be, the different aspects of its personality, from exploring the possibilities in picking?
The decision has to begin with what we are trying to express from the vineyard.
The lessons of this season have reinforced an idea that’s grown in my mind from the past ten years of farming and tasting, that great terroir is inevitable. The personality of a strong vineyard will always impose itself upon the wine, but the intensity and detail of that expression depends on the choices and engagement of its grower.
I didn’t expect this process of letting go and building relationship to be so connected and intertwined. As my familiarity with the vineyard grew, I began to see and question what I’d internalized elsewhere. Letting go of those beliefs has allowed the character of the vineyard to grow and speak with greater clarity and definition in our wine, deepening my understanding of and relationship to both again. A virtuous cycle of compounding improvement and learning that I didn’t expect, but am so grateful for.
I’ve come to feel, and believe deeply, that Miao Lu is a special place, that La Roche is a special vineyard, and that we have special people who work together to make the dream of the place possible.
We are still learning, but as I learn more each year, my sense of responsibility, my drive has grown, to bottle wine that captures all of our vineyard’s immense potential, its singular voice and my dream of what it can be.
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