Building Dicey.

The countdown to harvest can be quite stressful. You’ve got to keep one eye on the weather report and the other on finding staff. You have both hands busy tending to the vines and clearing out the cellar in anticipation of all the incoming juice that is about to descend on the winery. That is, if you have a winery!

While previous vintages had been produced in the comfort of the long established and very familiar winery over the hill, 2022 marked the first year where those facilities were not available to Dicey. We needed to build our own and time was running out.

As the site and consents were secured, focus turned to material supply and availability of trades people. Both proved higher hurdles than first considered and the cost of building anything had exponentially increased but there was no time to quibble. Veraison had signalled that the start of harvest wouldn’t be far away and we needed to get this building up and ready to roll, pronto like.

So tight was the timing in fact, that the concrete pad went down only one month out from the first fruit coming in from the vineyards. The walls and roof went up and before much else could be achieved we had to ask the builders to stand down for a bit in the name of safety while we welcomed the 2022 vintage in. It was certainly a dicey way to start what was possibly as close to a perfect season as you’ll get.

2022 been described as a vintage where average growers shone and good growers excelled, This vintage will be remembered for being close to the perfect season: a lack of frost and wind, warm and wet at the start with a protracted hot dry spell in the middle and a long cool ripening period. Overall a very warm season, small bunch numbers with big berries the fruit was clean and tasty!

Thank god we got that building up in time.

Determined to finish the job, the builders returned to site when it was physically possible to work around Matt and Ali and James’ team of pickers. Like Yin finding its balancing Yang and in some sort of simpatico, builders and winemakers worked alongside and around each other to get their respective jobs done. It was pretty romantic and it sure was special to see such a perfect vintage baptise the Dicey winery.

Additional storage buildings also now feature in the Dicey landscape. Built in the raging heat of the Bannockburn sun, containers working as vineyard sheds will help store both our vineyard equipment as well as some of our dry goods.

Our build is now nearing completion once again we will be in a rush with the upcoming vintage to get everything finished in time – such is the way. We’re now not far from repeating the process all over again as is the way with wine. What we do welcome is a winery ready to calmly embrace the most important part of the year for Dicey and for our other winemaking pals who share our space to make their wine. It takes a village after all.

Big thanks to:

Nathan and the ProSpec Structures team, as well as our local contractors, Sangster Electrical, Specialised Heating and Refrigeration, Anderson Plumbing.

Everyone went above and beyond.

To read the full techie run down of this build by our pals at ProSpec Structures, click here