We hope you had a wonderful New Year, and enjoyed some sun and good company with family and friends. Throughout December and January, we've been very busy in the vineyard, moving wires to accomodate the rampant growth, tucking and trimming the vines, and this last week we've done all the leaf plucking. We remove virtually all the leaves around the bunches of grapes, to provide maximum sun and air drainage. We just finished yesterday, and on Thursday we'll put the nets over the vines, to protect the crop from our abundant birdlife!
We have a bumper crop of Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir. The Viognier looks a little `patchy', which we believe is due to the incredibly cold and wet spring weather at flowering. However, final crop harvests should be well above last year.
We took our wine and olive oil to the Golden Bay A & P show on Saturday, where it was very well received, and we made good sales. The 2007 Viognier is now sold out, but we still have some Pinot Gris.

We appeared in the Nelson Mail wine column on 23 December 2008.

Neil Hodgson writes "Copper Lake 2008 Pinot Gris: This dry-style wine is elegant but packed with flavour. Rather than relying on punchy sweet, ripe fruit, this version from Copper Lake has fantastic ripe acidity to balance the multilayered pear and apple flavour. If this is a glimpse of the future, then it is bright for this new winery."  Read more ...