Jasper Hill Georgia's Paddock Shiraz 1998

Our aim is to make great wine, with the preservation of nature's flavours, complexities and balance in our wines by using minimal intervention in our vineyards and in the cellar - to allow the individual vineyard's "terroir" or sense of place to express itself.

Our wines are produced entirely on the estate using organic/biodynamic principles. We produce our own organic compost and have never used synthetic chemicals on either the vines or the soils, since our vineyards were planted in 1975.

Viticultural practices are as close to nature as we can get them: own rooted vines (ie. not grafted on to American rootstocks to confer Phylloxera resistance), no irrigation whatsoever, minimal tillage, natural inter-row mulching leading to broad bio-diversity, in turn giving depth and intensity to our wines. Only hand pruning of the vines and hand harvesting of the fruit can allow us the human connection to our living soil.

Minimal intervention is used during fermentation and maturation, allowing terroir or earth character of the individual paddock or plot to emerge in the wine. More importantly the grapes at harvest are flavour ripe, regardless of sugar ripeness.