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Serendipity at Work
Serendipity prevails at the Whalebone
Vineyard.
It is by chance that here, millions of years of
deposited marine animals have slowly risen
from the seabed over the last million years.
The skeleton of the once beach stranded
whale trapped in the subsequent deposits of
the much smaller marine creatures revealed
again in the cave eroded in the land locked
limestone represents double jeopardy.
Over the past million years, that same erosion
process has released the iron rich clay and
dust particles from the seabed limestone
where it had been deposited by wind and
water over the previous 25 million years. The
magic wand of erosion eternally waved over
ancient marine deposits and the result is
Terra Rossa soil intimately connected to its
parent limestone and forming one of the
great vine growing water and nutrient supply
systems of the world.
That wonderful soil could be buried under ice
in the Antarctic or in the middle of Simpson’s
Stony Desert, but it isn’t. It has been formed
at a location that has a climate that provides.
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the perfect mix of requirements to elicit the
best qualities from the varieties Cabernet
Sauvignon and Shiraz.
Then there is the chance element introduced
by man, the most capricious creature in all of
nature.
Choosing that site when everyone else was
planting in the much more fashionable
address of Coonawarra, and planting
Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz and Cabernet
Franc, a combination exactly suited to the
site is either an act of chance or of genius.
I won’t mention the Riesling and Pinot
Meuniere, long since pulled out because they
could not reflect the greatness of the site, its
terroir.
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Finally the choice to plant on wide spacing
was a conventional one in 1974 but the decision to not
crack up the limestone cap was probably to
save costs. If the limestone cap had been
effectively ripped, today the capacity of the
vines would be too great for the vine spacing
and the vineyard would suffer from shoot
crowding and too much vine vigour instead
of the perfect balance it has today.
A glimpse of this serendipity was evident in
1980 when I had the opportunity to help
with the making of the Ashbourne
Cabernet Sauvignon for Geoff Weaver,
the very first wine bottled from the
Whalebone Vineyard. It is a very good wine
to this day.
The Tapanappa partners are the beneficiaries
of this sequence of chance events We are
committed to assiduously refine the vineyard
and winemaking processes to coax the very
best from the wonderful Whalebone
Vineyard site and its terroir.
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