Hill of Grace
Hill of Grace: this surely is one of the most evocative phrases in the world of wine. It is a translation from the German ‘Gnadenberg’, a region in Silesia, and the name given to the lovely Lutheran Church across the road. For Henschke it is the name of both the vineyard and the wine that has so captured the heart of the red wine lover. The 8ha single vineyard on the original 32ha block sits at an altitude of 400m, and has an average rainfall of 520mm. It is situated at Parrot Hill, an isolated spot that was once an active village.
The land was originally granted to Charles Flaxman by land grant in 1842 for £1 per acre. It was then sold by George Fife Angas to Nicolaus Stanitzki in 1873, for £480. Following his death the property was transferred to his son Carl August Stanitzki in 1879, who later sold the vineyard and moved from the district. Paul Gotthard Henschke purchased the vineyard in 1891. After his death his sons and executors Paul Alfred and Julius Philip Henschke arranged the transfer to Julius Philip, who had married Ida Maria Magdalena Stanitzki, a daughter of Pauline and Anton Stanitzki (brother to Carl August Stanitzki). On Julius Philip’s death in 1928 the property transferred to his wife.
In 1951 the property was purchased by Louis Edmund Henschke, a son of Paul Alfred Henschke, who worked the vineyard and property for nearly 40 years. The family continues to maintain the heritage.
The vineyard is planted predominantly to shiraz, but a surprise to many is that it also includes other varieties: riesling, semillon and mataro (mourvèdre), with sercial now only a distant memory. But this planting of several varieties in the ‘garden’ as the old Barossan growers called their vineyard, is typical - a sort of hedging their bets against the vagaries of Mother Nature. The whites are used in Eden Valley varietals, and the mataro… well, that’s one of Mother Nature’s later maturing varieties. It has gone into Hill of Grace at times, but usually it just doesn’t ripen enough.
The Grandfathers, as the oldest block is called, was planted by Nicolaus Stanitzki around the 1860s. These vines are planted on their own roots from pre-phylloxera material brought from Europe by the early settlers. The sturdy, gnarled vines are dry grown and yield an average 1t/acre (2½t/ha). The shiraz vines are planted on a wide spacing of 3.1m between vines and 3.4m between rows. The 1m trellis consists of two wires which carry two to three arched canes with a bud number of around 40 to 50. The foliage is allowed to hang down to form a drooping canopy, which helps to reduce shoot vigour. The more vigorous blocks have been converted to VSP and Scott Henry to open up the canopy.
The mataro is grown as bush vines, which suits the upright growth of this variety. The whites are planted closer together than the reds, down to 2.2m, and have the regular 3.4m between rows to suit the old tractor widths.
Originally the ground was cultivated and the vines were ‘dodged off’ in spring and ‘hilled on’ again in early summer for weed control. Nowadays the vineyard has a permanent sod culture of early-maturing perennial rye grass in the row, which is mowed down low. The vines are no longer dodged and a mulch of wheat straw is used under the vines to retain soil moisture, build up organic matter, and inhibit weed growth. Prediction of disease pressure through an integrated pest management program is a strong part of Henschke’s viticultural management, resulting in minimal chemical input in the vineyard. Herbicides are used only when the season calls for dense weed or sod control, and, as the risk of mildew is low, fungicides used are copper and sulphur, which are accepted as organic – delete this paragraph and replace with the following. The vineyard is currently run incorporating organic and biodynamic practices. Yield estimates are carried out in early summer, and cropping levels are kept in check by bunch thinning at veraison.
The grapes are picked early to mid April at a sugar level of around 24° B. There is always a good acid/pH balance from this vineyard. The anthocyanins (colour pigments) in the berries are also very high, which perhaps offers a clue to the very high quality of the Hill of Grace shiraz.
Henschke viticulturist Prue Henschke (who has a Bachelor of Science in Botany and Zoology and studied with Stephen at Geisenheim) has often likened the Grandfathers to old soldiers. This was the catalyst for a clonal selection program, begun in 1986, to identify the best vines to propagate.
Prue and her assistant Uschi (Ursula Linssen), who also studied at Geisenheim, literally walked the rows together, earmarking potential vines. They took a scientific approach, using criteria such as even budburst and the absence of eutypa, a wood-rotting fungus that wasn’t the problem they had imagined. Then they moved through to flowering to look at bunch numbers per shoot, the evenness of flowering and veraison, virus, and finally the fruit itself. What was the bunch composition and bunch structure? How did sugar, pH and acid stack up? And all this was after they had already eliminated vines they didn’t deem suitable. It is painstaking work, slotted in with the Mount Edelstone selection. Prue says it will be at least a 20-year program over four selections.
At the same time, Louis Henschke did his own selection. While he never really discussed his criteria in depth, he chose what he thought were good, well-balanced vines based on his experience as a grower.
Cuttings from the selected ‘mother vines’, dubbed Lischi’s Selection and Uncle Lou’s Selection, were planted in the nursery vineyard to allow for further selection research, to find the top 10 vines. Since 1994 cuttings have been taken from the nursery, propagated, and replanted as needed on the Hill of Grace vineyard to replace old vines that have expired.
Apart from the Grandfathers, there are Post Office Blocks One and Two, the Post Office Block Young which is made up of the younger selected material located near the vines of the old post office, and the Church Block, House Block and Windmill Block.
Fruit is picked at different times according to ripeness and maturity then made as individual lots. Keeping the blocks separate allows for variations of soil types, vigour and age of the vines - all of which produce different flavours that become, if you like, a part of the complete wine.
For example in some years the Grandfathers, because they are in very deep soil, can have quite big bunches and big berries due to moisture retention of the soil, whereas the House Block bunches can be rather small and the berries tiny. This block can be picked anywhere from one to three weeks earlier than the Grandfathers, yet have greater concentration and colour intensity. Segregation of the fruit from picking to the final blending allows for the ultimate in site selection.
Located 4km north-west of Henschke Cellars, the vineyard is located on a unique part of the Moculta landscape where gentle protected slopes nestle against the rocky Boundary Road ridge to the east. Soils on these slopes are thick, red clay-rich barns overlain by a 20- to 25cm-thick veneer of brown, fine, sandy to silty loam; near Duck Ponds Creek, there is an additional layer of alluvial silty loam. Grandfathers and Post Office Block One vines, in the western parts of the vineyard, are on these soils, which have good moisture holding capacity down to over one and a 1.5m. On the House Block, in the eastern part of the vineyard, the red clay soil is thinner, and is overlain first by a 2- to 3cm-thick layer of gravel wash from the hill to the east, then by a layer of the same fine sandy to silty loam found in the western parts of the vineyard. Soil profiles in the rest of the vineyard grade between these two types.
Rocks beneath the red clay soils are schists of Cambrian (about 540 million years) age. These are metamorphosed mineral-rich sediments, originally deposited in a shallow sea, then deeply buried, and finally pushed back up to the surface during the formation of the Mount Lofty Ranges where they weathered to produce a thick soil layer. The thin gravel layer beneath the House Block is one of the clues that the upper ‘veneer’ of sandy to silty loam is made up mostly of fine sand and clay, called loess, blown in from the west during a more recent interglacial period - either about 18,000 to 25,000 years ago, or possibly about 135,000 years ago - when the region was very dry and cold. By its presence, this layer tells us that the rich red soils of the Hill of Grace vineyard have remained undisturbed in this protected little pocket ever since that time. It’s just one of those nice little accidents of nature!