2021 Vintage Report

2021 was a very talented vintage right from the start. In 25 vintages, I can never remember a vintage where everything climatically fell into place so perfectly.

We had a great start to the 2020 Winter, with good amounts of early rain. We then hit a period of little to close to no rainfall from mid-June to mid-July, the days were sunny and still and this had us very concerned. We needed to see winter rains to build hydraulic pressure within our soil profiles and to see water permeate right throughout the soil.

Luckily the rains came again, and we had excellent rainfall from August through to October. The growing season in late November and December started out with nice even and moderate temperatures, the La Nina weather pattern did not bring unseasonal rainfall to South Australia, as it was wreaking havoc on Australia’s eastern seaboard. The vines were able to set excellent shoot length and the flowering went through easily. Vine architecture on the trellis was very easy to achieve and as the summer came, the temperatures stayed very moderate, we only recorded one day over 40oC for the entire summer.

Crop loads were on average across the board from every region Two Hands sources from. The berry configuration was on the smaller to moderate size, delivering more intensity at a lower potential alcohol than we had experienced in both the 2019 and 2020 vintages. We received a perfectly timed rain in late February 2021, this gave the vines the perfect amount of moisture to help the vines to continue their ripening phase.

Slow ripening through the vineyards allowed us to make excellent picking decisions as we were greeted with grapes that possessed near-perfect levels of flavour, sugar, acidity, and tannin. Harvest continued at a slow pace right through March and into mid-April.

Another interesting point to highlight in 2021 was how even the vintage was across our flotilla of vineyards. The fruit quality was high across all the regions we work with. Barossa Valley, Eden Valley, Clare Valley, Adelaide Hills, Heathcote, and McLaren Vale; one did not shine above another.

Our Estate vineyards Holy Grail and Branson Coach House performed brilliantly in the 2021 growing season. The medium size crop ripened slowly and perfectly, we were able to process each clone and batch separately and this gave us a large amount of blending options for our very best wines.

As our new plantings at Holy Grail vineyard mature we can start to see the differences in the characteristics of each block. A real stand out in the 2021 was a patch of Shiraz that was propagated from the original 1891 Shiraz vines at Wendouree Cellars in the Clare Valley. These vines' leaves are lighter in colour and the clusters are loose.

This block is always the first to be flavour ripe, and after barrel trailing this wine in the winery we decided to make a small Single Vineyard Series bottling named 'Cleo’s Block'. 2021 is an extremely talented vintage, one that we will be talking about for many years to come. This form has now been franked having followed each individual bottle through maturation in our cellars and into bottle.

The wines are very well balanced and have a soft and endless energy. All components of the wine work so brilliantly and synergistically together that you wonder if we will ever be able to repeat the process with mother nature on our side. 

- Michael Twelftree, Proprietor