The Love Family Vineyard

This single-variety, specialist Pinot Noir vineyard in its five vintages to-date has greatly added to New Zealand's rapidly growing international reputation as a producer of Pinot Noir wines ranked amongst those of the highest quality in the world.

The vineyard is situated on the outskirts of Alexandra, the true centre and hub of Central Otago, New Zealand. This area is well known for its cold winters and hot summers temperatures can range from -15 to +40 degrees Celsius. These summer temperatures coupled with a meagre 11 inches of annual rainfall can reduce our property to semi-arid. However the necessary irrigation is available by way of a dripper to each vine, with overhead sprinklers for frost protection. This gives us total moisture control, a luxury when producing high quality fruit.

Our vineyard is situated on what was a lakebed many thousands of years ago, and the resultant schisty gravels, the silts and the clays further enhance the fruit quality. Ours is a small family operation on a property of 11 hectares. Of this 11 hectares, 3.5 ha. are in pinot noir, with clones UCD5, 10/5, 115, and 667 in similar proportions. A lesser amount of 777 makes up the 13000 vines. With intensive planting (ie3700/ha) we increase the canopy dramatically (26 plus brix @ picking) and thin out heavily. This starts with shoot thinning then continues with fruit thinning right up till picking. The sometimes 50-60% thinning leaves our pickers to harvest all remaining fruit.

Our meso-climate is enhanced by an extensive tree cover to isolate us from the cold southwest winds, while also the stony lakebed to a certain degree, helps to hold the days heat. The GDD rating first year was 1330 hrs. Our recent 2006 harvest, ( our 5th crop) produced 1600 cases equivalent and we envisage an annual production of 3000 plus cases. Further recent plantings of 5000 vines will eventually take our production to higher levels. The intensive planting is peculiar to our vineyard along with the vertical shoot positioning trellis and extensive thinning regime.

After planting we decided to work to build up soil organism to get closer to 3- 5 fungi to 1 bacteria as grapes are much more suited to soils close to these proportions. We applied Bio-Start Mycorrcin to promote a healthy vine-root environment, to enhance mineral uptake, and to improve grape quality. In addition the vines were treated with Foliacin to assist the production of resveratrol which helps the vine fight off diseases and has been associated with the desirable health effects of red wine drinking.

From the earliest plantings of the James Love vineyard in the late 1990s, both the grandsons, Jim and Bluey have maintained a watchful and hands-on involvement with all viticultural aspects, including shoot thinning and fruit thinning by hand in the summer months, since their vines first came into productivity.

Quality is our hallmark, and the vines are individually and lovingly tended with the fruit hand-selected to produce, for you, a wine of true excellence.