Hello Adrian Englefield here, Development Officer for Viticulture with the New South
Wales Department of Primary Industries.
On the 11th of May 2016 the DPI in conjunction with the Riverina Wine Grapes Marketing Board
and New South Wales Wine Industry Association hosted a workshop at Riverina TAFE looking
at Durif.
Speakers on the day presented case studies looking at viticultural and wine making considerations
and experiences with Durif.
The University of Adelaide's Dr Peter Dry delivered an overview of the Durif variety
and Professor Alain Deloire from the National Wine and Grape industry center updated attendees
on a project from South Africa.
To complete the workshop Master of Wine Nick Bullied conducted a tailored tasting of a
range of Durif wines from across Australia and South Africa.
This video contains some insights from the day and useful resources for current and potential
Durif producers.
It's certainly a challenge, I don't think anything easy is really worth having and Durif
is one of those examples that brings the best out in you.
Dam good drink, really enjoy a good Durif.
Challenges would be tight bunched variety.
Ripening you obviously need to get it to full ripeness to achieve tannin ripeness, which
in turn is picked up in the wine and obviously made to drink early.
As we are, you need that tannin ripeness.
It Rutherglen one of the great things about Durif is it's amazing ability to produce colour
and Tannin.
And if you get that right it will produce an amazing wine.
To grow great Durif is that we need to carefully manage our irrigation but carefully manage
our crop load to make sure the fruit is adequately balanced across the whole vine.
Dufif I think of as one of the fullest bodied red wines.
I'd like generous dark fruits, black berry, black plumb, nicely ripe without getting into
the jammy spectrum and without showing any green characteristics.
Nice full bodied, palate with good flesh, firm tannins but the tannins must be in balance
with the other constituents of the wine.
And good length of flavor as you would expect with any wine.
The really good Durif I think needs to be able to develop in bottle, people want more
complexity.
Getting nice, sort of cedar, earth and leather characters as well as developing from those
dark fruits and will always be quite a full bodied firm wine, obviously with the tannins
softening with age.
In broad terms I still look for dark fruits, full body, and so on in the Riverina.
Which is a bit of a contract to Rutherglen, your actually spanning quite a wide range
of price points.
And also having heard from several producers here your clearly doing more work in the vineyard.
Getting vines in better balance, lowering yields but still getting the same profitability
out of the vineyard.
So we have seen some wines which are relatively accessible.
The tannins are a little softer than some of the bigger wines which make the wines attractive
now but we saw some of these wines have the ability to age, but there are some Durif's
being made here now that show much better depth of flavor, more structure, really good
barrel aging and clearly have potential to develop and clealy have the potential to sell
at higher price points.
The Riverina is a great region for growing Durif as a variety.
We are seeing a lot more new planting coming on board across the district.
So it is great to see the NSW DPI pull together this workshop here in the Riverina for our
local growers to learn and understand the variety better and be able to apply that new
knowledge.
The NSW DPI would like to thank the participants and presenters on the day that made the Durif
workshop a success including Riverina Wine Grapes Markting Board and NSW WIA.
Please see the links to other useful resources from the DPI Durif Workshop that will be posted
in VineWatch June 2016.
Thank you.