Hunter Valley winemaker Andrew Thomas provides an update on the vineyard that has supplied his flagship Kiss Shiraz being bulldozed for a housing development.
Thanks for picking up on the article in The Weekend Australian regarding the demise of the Pokolbin Estate vineyard to developers.
This is clearly a devastating outcome not only to our own business, but also the wider Hunter Valley wine community.
From the day that Devcore purchased the property and announced their plans, I have tried to take a softly softly approach with them, explaining that there were certain avenues they could take to turn a potentially bad PR exercise into a good news story, but unfortunately these all fell on deaf ears.
There is zero respect for the history, the future, nor the very fabric of the Hunter Valley wine community when it comes to these money-grabbing opportunists.
Since the breaking of this story, the level of outrage and support has been quite overwhelming.
I’m sad to report that all the subdivisions and civil works have now been completed and the vast majority (90 percent) of these old vines have been removed to make way for the houses to be built.
There are some token old vines left at the rear of each subdivision, and in due course I will be contacting each of the owners to ascertain their appetite for us to manage these small parcels in an attempt to continue this vineyard’s legacy, albeit on a micro scale.
We have also just last week planted out around 3,000 cuttings that we took into a nursery on our Braemore vineyard in an attempt to preserve the genetic material.
To the dissenters that made comments that perhaps I should have just purchased the land myself to keep the development at bay, it’s pretty simple maths.
The property sold for approximately four or five times the price with the zombie DA attached to it than it would have as prime viticultural land.
Therein lies the issue.
The romance of living within a wine region will continue to happen at the expense of the viticultural landscape that makes it so attractive in the first place.
I do hope that shining a light on this travesty will provide some impetus for protecting our prized vineyards into the future, both within the Hunter Valley and beyond.
The article mentioned that the (Nick Ryan 97 points) 2023 Kiss Shiraz will be our very last vintage, however we did actually get a crop in 2024 and that vintage will be released in May next year.