Great Southern wineries positive about quality 2022 harvest despite worker shortages

Vintage 2022 is kicking off in vineyards across the Great Southern — and the early signs are promising despite the challenge of worker shortages. Rob Wignall, owner of Wignalls Wines in Albany, said his winery was one of the first to start picking in the Great Southern this year. “The colour is extremely dark and the aroma is really unique. It’s going to be a unique season this year,” Mr Wignall said. “The quality so far is off the Richter scale. “It looks absolutely amazing.” Mr Wignall said the vines were in good condition after plenty of rain. “The record-breaking winter gave all the vines their deep root structure, gave them all a break from the dryness that we’ve had. “The secondary factor which is extremely unusual in the Great Southern this year is we all experienced an excessively late bud burst post-winter.” Handpicking has also started at Castelli Estate in Denmark. “I reckon the season’s looking about three weeks later than normal, and white crops are anywhere from 20-40 per cent lighter than in previous years,” Castelle Estate chief winemaker Andrew Vesey said. “Overall it looks like a very good season, just not as much crop as we’d all like to have, and probably later in the season than we’d like. “We got a little bit of cool weather, and a wet winter and wet spring, through flowering in Frankland, so that’s probably what’s knocked Rieslings and things around a little bit in terms of their yield out there.” Laura Penniment from Alkoomi Wines, whose vineyards are based in Frankland River, said the flowering of their vines had also been affected. “We had a couple of issues during flowering, there was some pretty wild weather so some things are a little inconsistent in some varieties, mostly in the Cabernet,” she said. “You can see that some fruit hasn’t set properly at all, it kind of just doesn’t really exist. “It doesn’t really effect flavours or anything like that, it just reduces yield quantity.” She said the vines had also benefited from last winter’s rain. “It meant our canopies are quite big and luscious and green, so even though it’s been quite hot for the last few months, thankfully we’ve had quite a bit of shading to help with that.” For Plantagenet Wines vines in Mt Barker, the soaking wet winter has put their vintage about two weeks behind schedule, according to general manager Tom Wisdom. “It was probably one of the wettest winters that Mt Barker has seen with almost 1000ml of rain, which is well above the average of about 700ml, so it just took a long time for the grape vines to get going,” Mr Wisdom said. “Then it was quite cool into October, and the early part of November, so bud burst was delayed which delayed flowering and then that delayed sort of the whole season. “But nice warm weather in January and February has accelerated the process, so now we’re sort of back to where we thought we would be with harvest.” He expects to start first harvesting this week and is predicting “a nice quality harvest”, although they will have to undertake more mechanised picking than they would prefer. “We do like to do handpicking, which is quite labour intensive but if the labour’s not around it sort of causes you to go down mechanical routes,” he said. “We’d love to get more seasonal pickers in but they’re just not available.” Staffing has been an issue for wineries across the Great Southern since WA’s hard border was imposed early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Mr Wignall said his winery had experienced “extreme challenges” in getting enough staff, going from their typical number of 40 seasonal workers to just four over the last year. Filling these gaps across the region has been several teams of workers based in Mt Barker where they settled after leaving Afghanistan as refugees. These workers are in demand at wineries across the Great Southern. “From a grape-picking point of view, because we’re all handpicked here, we are struggling for pickers,” Mr Vesey said. “I know that the Afghan workers have struggled to keep up with demand because the backpacking contingent hasn’t been available to use in the larger scale vineyards directly. “Our plan is we will pick up some of the Afghan workers as they become available, and if we have to pick over two or three days for some blocks instead of picking them all in one day, then that’s how we’ll deal with that.” Although Alkoomi Wines machine-pick all their fruit, Ms Penniment said they had still struggled to attract enough staff and were working with a “skeleton crew”. “Everyone’s running around like headless chickens because everyone’s doing a little bit of everything,” she said. “We’ve closed our Frankland River cellar door, because we don’t have the staff to man everything.” Additionally, there are shortages in acquiring staff who can help with the winemaking process. “That certainly is the pinch point for that skills shortage in the winery,” Mr Vesey said. “Whereas with grape picking, yes there’s a skills shortage, but it’s a skills shortage of hands and hours, as opposed to knowledge.” Across the wineries, there seems to be little confidence that the worker shortage situation will improve quickly. “I don’t think anyone really knows what to expect,” Ms Penniment said. “We haven’t heard anything. Usually we get inquiries and things like that if people are interested in jobs, but we haven’t seen anything yet.”