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 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.

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.