Elaine and Rodney Schmidt grow our Schmidt Vineyard Mencía at Vine Vale, Barossa Valley.
Note: Rodney sadly passed away in January 2020, aged 73.
Elaine: The original Schmidt family property is near to our place. That was given to Rodney’s parents as a wedding present from their parents in 1943. They thought it was a useless block of land because it was all sandy. Well, Dad Schmidt had grown carrots for the army during the war. So that’s what they did, starting growing carrots.
Rodney left school at the minimum legal age of 14 and started full-time work with his parents growing carrots at the farm. Apparently, he couldn't leave school quick enough and they got a fine for the kids not going to school! Farming was originally done by hand and it was very labour intensive.
Rodney’s parents bought our property in the 60s. This land was put in Rodney’s name. So when we got married in 1972, we moved to the property.
We pulled out all the vines on the land and planted carrots. They were all old vines – who knows what we pulled out! No one was doing much good in grapes at that time. But there were a lot of carrots grown here; about 30 carrot growers in the Barossa Valley when I first got married.
It was only in 1996, after we got out of carrots, that we started with the grapes.
We thought about it and I just said: 'Well, why don't we make our own wine?' And so we decided to grow a fruit salad block, which was lovely – a bit of Zinfandel, some Merlot and some Grenache.
Our second son, Matthew, made the first lot of wine in 2001, because he was studying winemaking. [He’s now a winemaker at Bremerton Wines in Langhorne Creek.) Just a little batch, a mixture. And then we made another batch from our fruit salad block in 2002. That was a really good year.
We didn't really sell any grapes to anyone in the beginning, because we didn't have that much. But then in 2004, Torbreck Vintners wanted Durif grapes, so that's when we started to expand. We've got 4 acres under vines now, on our 7-acre block.
The Mencía was planted in 2013. Half was rootlings that we planted, half was grafted onto the Grenache after we sold that year’s fruit.
When we were establishing the vines, so many times I'd be thinning the fruit out and Rodney would just about cry. He didn't want me cutting anything off and here I'd be, thinning bunches left, right and centre. He was worried I was taking too much off. But the end result was worth it.
In some places on our block, the sand is 10-foot (3 metres) deep. I guess the Mencía struggles a bit to get a lot of canopy here in the sand. It struggles to get the leaf, but the fruit is really lovely.
Picking is always good fun. We pick by hand, so we get friends and people who I've met picking in years gone by. You get to know who wants to pick and who doesn't. We're all getting a bit old now, but if they're still alive, you phone them! They're a great group of people.
Rodney was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2015. I've always been interested in the vineyards and always done things, but I started to really take it on from there.
The vineyard work is a bit more on your own compared to working in the carrot shed. But with grapes, you can do a few other things. There's certain times of the year when it's busy, but other than that, the vines sort of look after themselves.
So it’s nice, you get a bit more freedom.