Is it simply schmaltzy sentimental prattle, or is there something in what these fervent admirers are saying?

Here is a saga as gnarled and time worn as those old bush vines and its focus is yield. Sometime in the mid 80's, the South Australian Government decided (in their wisdom of the day) to instigate the vine-pull scheme in an attempt to rid the grape and wine industry of uneconomic, non-productive vineyards.

The emphasis was on the older cultivars which had fallen out of favour: palomino, pedro ximenez, trebbiano and the like.

Unfortunately, in the ruckus, old vineyards of shiraz and grenache also bit the felt and winemakers have been grieving ever since. Grieving, mainly, for the loss of small parcels of intensely flavoured, deeply coloured, rich grapes with power to last a generation in the bottle.

Also in the 80's, the Richard Smart school of thought emerged as a new and radical philosophy, which subsequently achieved manifesto status. Its basic tense was leaf and grape exposure, the big idea being that one could load the vine up with grapes and attain maximum flavour by opening the canopy of leaves up to allow sunlight to fall on as much as possible.

The truth is somewhere in between these two opposing schools of thought. The French of course, have always limited grape yield. And, slowly but surely, the Australians, through scientific research and our own brand of iconoclastic cynicism, have conceded the point.

The point is in a word; balance. Balance is notoriously difficult to define but easy to assess by eye. A trained wine grape grower is able to walk up to a vine and state 'this vine is balanced' or 'this isn't', but ask them to explain why and you will be there for three hours. They are unconsciously taking many factors into consideration: vine health, depth and health of the root system, vine capacity, shoot numbers, bunch numbers, vine age, soil structure, climate and irrigation regimes.

Winemakers naturally want the best grapes they can lay their hands on: that old adage 'you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear' has never been truer than with wine grapes. An over cropped vine tends to produce watery, flavourless wine with a correspondingly low alcohol content. On the other hand, a low yielding vine in full health produces a powerful wine rich in colour, flavour and tannin, but it may not be economically viable to produce such grapes on a commercial scale. The question really becomes one of attaining maximum yield without compromising wine quality, which roughly translates into what cropping level can I get away with?

Looking at the problem from another aspect, consider each vine as having a fixed capacity for flavour. Certain viticultural techniques can influence the potential size of this flavour pool to an extent, however there are limits to how far it can be pushed.

The same size flavour pool distributed over 2 kg of grapes will obviously result in more intense, concentrated flavour than if it were distributed over 10 kg of grapes.

At Preston Peak we have always been fully committed to producing quality wine. Never content to rest on our laurels, we are constantly experimenting with soil management techniques, pruning levels and crop levels. We are now in a position to capitalise on this knowledge in the aim for better grapes and, by extension, better wine. The fundamentals of this quest have been heavy winter pruning and summer crop thinning in order to reduce yield and dramatically increase quality. Quality before quantity...