The Optimist

The first harvest was in autumn 1999. We made a small quantity of the grapes into wine at home (Home Paddock label). Most of the grapes were traded to winemaker, Andrew Hood, Cambridge, in exchange for equivalent in wine. Due to the small harvest, he blends our grapes with others from the same area. We were very pleased with the first vintage of the wine from this small harvest. The chardonnay was a dry, unwooded Chardonnay with a pleasant fruity after-taste. The 100 bottles of of the 1999 harvest are sold out, with a few retained to test their aging quality.

The long hot and dry summer of 1999/2000, with the help of drip irrigation, produced a lovely crop which promised high sugar content with good flavour. It was harvested a little earlier than planned because of the plagues of European wasps descending on the sweet berries and threatening to decimate them. The harvest on April 16, 2000, thanks to our happy band of neighbourhood pickers, produced 330 kg, over double the 1999 harvest, with a sugar content of 22.4 Brix. The wine will be made again by Andrew Hood, as an unwooded Chardonnay, and bottled in spring 2000.

Bellendena vineyard was established in 1995 on half a hectare on the Tinderbox Peninsula, about 20 km south of Hobart on the western shore of the River Derwent.