Allinda Winery

Blending Tradition & Technology to Produce Wines of Distinction

HISTORY

Allinda winery is a small winery, established in 1990, in the foothills of The Great Dividing Range at the northern end of the Yarra Valley by Al and Linda Fencaros. Al originally graduated from the University of Melbourne as an applied chemist. After a short period in the paint industry, Al decided the odours of paint, whilst often intoxicating, were rarely pleasurable. Al then went on to graduate as a winemaker from Charles Sturt University and honed his practical winemaking skills with two prestigious local wineries.

Allinda is a modern, well equipped winery producing 10,000 cases of wine per year which is divided between the Allinda brand, made exclusively from estate grown grapes, and contract winemaking for other Victorian brands.

VITICULTURE

Great wines start in the vineyard. At Allinda, we have a very small vineyard of only 8 acres, so it makes sense to do what ever it takes to grow excellent fruit. This started with using Cabernet, Chardonnay and Riesling clones sourced from local vineyards that had a proven record for producing quality fruit in this climate.

The importance of crop levels, vigour control and fruit exposure to optimum fruit quality have been well proven. At Allinda the Scott

Henry trellis system is used. Whilst this system is one of the most expensive to set up and to maintain, when used correctly it does, without doubt, optimise fruit quality.

Sustainability has become a buzzword in society. Arguably, this concept is more critical in agriculture than almost any other industry. Firstly, because the goods it produces we ingest on a daily basis! Secondly, Australian agricultural land is very old and delicate and requires excellent stewardship if it is to be passed on to future generations without being degraded.

At Allinda, we have put much resource into biological farming practices based on the principles of Elaine Ingham (see details at www.soilfoodweb.com.au). We use compost teas to ensure a healthy and diverse range of soil organisms. We make sure that their populations thrive by applying fish oil, seaweed extract and humates regularly. We do not use pecticides or herbicides (other than organic pine oil) in the vineyard. Clover, used as a living mulch, not only minimises weed growth, insulates soil from temperature extremes and reduces moisture loss from the soil, it also fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere, meaning that we not use fertilisers, other than for trace elements. To ensure optimum fruit quality year-in-year-out, we cannot dispense with all fungicides. We have a carefully managed program to minimise their use, but we consider that it would be detrimental to fruit, and therefore wine quality to abolish a critical part of our tool bag for the sake of pursuing an organic ideology to a detrimental extreme.

WINEMAKING

Much can be said about the art and science of winemaking. Ultimately, to produce wines of distinction, it is important to use our modern understanding of winemaking science to assure product quality. But even more importantly, to marry this with some of the traditional techniques that have been proven to go beyond science in defining the character of a wine. At Allinda we use the oft-neglected sense of touch as a

focal point for our winemaking style. We believe that wines should not only stimulate our sense of sight, smell and taste, but also our tactile sense – the wine should feel pleasurable on the palate.

Achieving tactile excellence requires achieving a delicate balance between acidity and “sweet” sensations such as those contributed by residual sugar levels, alcohol and the glycerol produced during fermentation. It also requires achieving high levels of amino acids through techniques such as extended contact with yeast lees. Perhaps most importantly of all, it requires much attention to phenolic composition through selective extraction of soft, drying tannins and minimisation of hard, bitter tannins. At Allinda we are constantly working at optimising our winemaking techniques to achieve the highest standards of tactile quality in our wines.

DISTRIBUTORS:

Yarra Valley & Dandenong Ranges: Tony Inglese - 0408 105 418

Melbourne: William Chong, Bacchus Wines – 0419 225 978

National: Lee Evemy, Wide World of Wine – 0410 488 692

Singapore: Cold Storage, Melvin Koh – +65 9688 0813

Philippines: Asia Wine Connection, Lester Solden - +65 0414 275 841

China: Longfellows Wine Exports, Theresa Sun - +86 21 5058 8561, George Zaal - +61 3 9428 5444

Blending Tradition and Technology

to Produce Wines of Distinction