Maintenance of this special vineyard includes careful hand pruning in the winter. It takes at least 5 years to learn how to prune the gnarly old vines. Because they are so old, each vine has a unique growth habit, and is pruned individually to suit its vigour potential. This ensures each vine will maintain balanced growth during the season and ultimately produce fruit that will be crafted into wine of the quality we are proud to produce under the Block 6 label. To capture the concentrated intensity of these ancient vines, our team also practice shoot thinning. When shoots are approximately 10-15 cm long our team manually remove excess shoots where there may be more than one growing from a bud. This ensures the eventual fruit of each vine is not diluted into many shoots, but concentrated in the selected few. Finally, to cater to the fragile vines, our Block 6 vineyard is hand-picked, ensuring no vine is damaged and all the fruit is kept in the best condition possible. The Shiraz that goes into our premium Hillside Shiraz allows Kay Brothers to pick various parcels of fruit so as to assemble the best blend possible. Block 11, located at the top of the hill, has shallow sandy loam soil over limestone and sandstone. These vines are very exposed to the wind and sun. As a consequence, the vines mature earlier in most years and tend to be low yielding, with intense fruit concentration and powerful tannins. The rest of the Hillside Shiraz is located farther down the hill, in New Bloc
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McLaren Vale, South Australia, Australia