Winemaking is very much about patience, observation, respect for what the vineyard gives you, from soil to vine to press. The fruit begins to reveal itself – this is where the science and precision meet instinct. Watching closely, tasting often, where experience and instinct guide each decision. Then time and careful guidance take over. Each decision made quietly allowing the wine to find its true shape.
Wine begins long before the cellar. It’s the quiet decisions made long before harvesting the grapes. At the end of the day, the wine belongs to the land. Our work is to read the vineyard very carefully and translate that place faithfully into the glass.
At Rochford we believe winemaking is driven by intuition, guided by the fruit itself. Every season gives us something new, a blank canvas with vivid possibilities. It’s actually quite a creative task, to shape the winemaking processes in an ever-balanced interaction with the demands of the season.
Rochford has invested heavily in vineyard and winery development over the last 5 years. Vines have been reworked, new clones planted, ecosystems for improving soil and pest control have been embraced. The Rochford winery is now home to a state of the art processing equipment, a mechanical sorting conveyor, a destemming machine designed to maintain the integrity of whole berries, and a press with sensitively variable pressure rates.
All this technology, to enable the simplest of objectives. To let the fruit, speak for itself.
With all the fruit coming from Rochford owned or managed vineyards and most from the iconic home vineyard, the range is about expressing the flavours of Rochford. The fruit is harvested in strict batches to retain plenty of control over ferment and blending decisions. This range embraced both the natural and inoculated ferment methods, with a combination of whole bunch and whole berries where appropriate. An increase in the maceration times and oak components allows greater complexity to develop in this range. Wines are bottled with minimal to no fining thanks again to the winery equipment. The Rochford Estate range showcases all the elegance and flavour intensity you come to expect in the Yarra Valley, resulting in wines that show well young, but age gracefully.
Our flagship range, capturing the essence of the Yarra Valley with depth, structure and a sense of place in every glass.
This selective range depicts a strong sense of place and is a celebration of the diversity of the Yarra Valley soils and microclimates. Each parcel of fruit has been allocated after years of discovering the best performing pockets of vineyard under the Rochford banner. Hand-picked when flavours are at their peak, wild fermented in small batches to retain purity of site and developed into wines of clarity and stunning intensity through extended maceration times and high-quality oak. The style of each wine is determined by the flavours in each parcel of fruit. Each Single Vineyard wine expresses its individuality and sheer purity of flavour that lingers long in the memory and even longer in the cellar.
The pinnacle of our ranges, these wines are a pure reflection of
site, season and the individuality of each vineyard block.
