{"id":6,"date":"2011-01-07T00:20:07","date_gmt":"2011-01-07T00:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/?p=6"},"modified":"2012-08-30T22:32:46","modified_gmt":"2012-08-30T22:32:46","slug":"exciting-things-in-the-adelaide-hills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/?p=6","title":{"rendered":"New Gruner Veltliner in the Adelaide Hills, Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"gruner<\/a><\/dt>\n
New plantings at Hahndorf Hill Winery<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

Exciting things are happening at Hahndorf Hill Winery in the Adelaide Hills!<\/p>\n

We’ve just extended our plantings of Gruner Veltliner and will continue to do so over the next 12 months, until we have fully planted our new 2.2 hectare vineyard block.<\/p>\n

It’s amazing to think that four years ago, in 2006, \u00c2\u00a0the original plant material arrived in Australia as three individual, dormant canes, each about\u00c2\u00a020cm long.\u00c2\u00a0They were airfreighted from Austria and transferred directly to the huge government-operated quarantine facility in Melbourne.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Here they were scrubbed and\u00c2\u00a0hot-water treated,\u00c2\u00a0poked and tested for a range of viral and other diseases.\u00c2\u00a0 After nearly three years and having passed all the tests, the plant material was\u00c2\u00a0given the ‘all clear’, and we were then given permission\u00c2\u00a0to propagate\u00c2\u00a0hundreds of\u00c2\u00a0little vines using tissue culture techniques at the Melbourne-based Primary Industries facility.<\/p>\n

These tiny new ‘laboratory babies’\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0were initially grown on agar plates\u00c2\u00a0and then allowed to go dormant\u00c2\u00a0before being\u00c2\u00a0transferred to us in the Adelaide Hills in October 2009. The excitement of their arrival was\u00c2\u00a0immediately dampened by our shock and surprise\u00c2\u00a0when we saw how small the individual plants were. On average, they were about 5cm high and about as substantial as a blade of grass. Nonetheless, we persevered and planted\u00c2\u00a0out this batch of 3000 little vines. Because the plantlings were so tiny, we inserted a lolly stick next to each\u00c2\u00a0new vine to identify where it had been planted.\u00c2\u00a0After a few weeks, fresh, tiny buds started to appear and very soon we had a crop of growing mini-vines. The survival rate was surprisingly good under the circumstances – 87% – and is apparently due to the fact that tissue cultured vines tend to have strong root systems.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One year and much TLC later, we now have an established young vineyard. But this is not the only thing that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re celebrating! There was sufficient growth in the new vineyard after the first season, so that in winter 2010 we were able to harvest several thousand cuttings. In close collaboration with\u00c2\u00a0the Adelaide Hills Vine Improvement (AHVI) group, new plants have since been propagated and have now been handed over to five other Adelaide Hills growers for planting. This exciting development is the culmination\u00c2\u00a0of our belief that the cool-climate Adelaide Hills, with its significant diurnal variation of temperature during the ripening season, will prove to be the perfect new home for Gruner in the Southern Hemisphere. It is for this reason we are delighted\u00c2\u00a0to share our plant material with other growers in the Hills and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s now with great hope and joy that we celebrate the arrival and establishment of this northern stranger to the\u00c2\u00a0beautiful Adelaide Hills.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>PS: It’s interesting to\u00c2\u00a0note that the vines\u00c2\u00a0seem to have settled down extremely well in their slate-rich, loamy-clay soils. Our first vintage -\u00c2\u00a0GRU 2010 -\u00c2\u00a0has remarkable minerality which undoubtedly has its source in this complex soil.<\/p>\n

Click the link below to read more about our GRU 2010 – and other wines.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/bit.ly\/9eXoyM<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New plantings at Hahndorf Hill Winery Exciting things are happening at Hahndorf Hill Winery in the Adelaide Hills! We’ve just extended our plantings of Gruner Veltliner and will continue to do so over the next 12 months, until we have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,8],"tags":[37,9,38,7],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adelaide-hills","category-gruner-veltliner","category-wine","tag-adelaide-hills","tag-gru","tag-gruner-veltliner","tag-new-planting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegrufiles.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}