Flash is a facility to allow for dynamic web display, such as advertisements, movies and slideshows, and was used to produce the slideshow banner on this websites start page. It is produced by Adobe and has been in the press a lot of late, mostly due to arguments between Apple and Adobe and Apple's insistence that it won't allow flash on the iPhone or iPad.

Flash is notorious for consuming lots of processing power from your computer's CPU, and as a result can drive your fans quite hard and flatten your batteries quite fast (if you own a laptop or other portable device).

I'm not fully convinced that all alternatives to flash will significantly reduce consumption of processing power, although I understand they are coming (HTML5). In the meantime, I didn't like it, that my website looked odd without the flash slideshow on the front page when viewed from my iPhone or iPad. So with that in mind, I’ve finally decided to update the site and remove its dependence on flash.

I hope you like the change, you now have the added benefit of pausing or starting the slideshow as well as downloading the images of our vineyard.

Tags: Apple, Adobe, HTML5, Flash

The label design says a little about us, and was inspired by a desire to show a sense of place. We’re located on a ridge just north of the McHarg Ranges in Glenhope East. And because of those ranges, it is always windy, with a good stiff breeze coming from the range, hence the image of the tree. And thanks to that wind, which is almost always present on mornings and evenings, the grapes are never as heat stressed as they are in other vineyards in the region.

And we have the two main colours, being the blue sky representing the sunny weather that is common in central Victoria and the reddish brown earth due to the abundance of iron stone and sandstone in the ground. Finally, there is the crimson ribbon (the colour of the wine) delineating the earth from the sky and of course a product of the two.

It is the iron in the ground in Heathcote that gives this region the dark purplish intense coloured wines it is renowned for.

This summer has shown many different faces with a long cool beginning, a fierce fiery middle and now a more predictable balmy ending.

With some of the hazy smoke filled days following black Saturday (7th February, 2009), we’re now concerned with the effect the smoke may have made to the vines. But so far there doesn’t seem to be a concern as recent testing does not show any taint in initial juice samples. We’re very lucky in our location as we are just north of the McHarg Ranges which provides a fairly regular mountain breeze each morning and evening, thus blowing away most smoke. Down below in Heathcote though, they’re not so lucky.

Another concern is heat stress... Many of the vineyards are dropping fruit because the plants are shutting down and losing their canopies. So far, we’ve managed fairly well, but I’m concerned that I may have over gambled when I allowed our vines to carry too much fruit. They’re looking good at the moment as veraison has set in and are carrying about 9% sugar.

Welcome to the site. I’m just learning about website creation and made this one on an Apple Computer using Rapidweaver (a really great product, but is taking me some time to get acquainted with). The theme is called ‘Catalog’ and is from seyDoggy. I think it’s starting to look fairly polished, but there will probably be many changes to come over the ensuing years.

Cheers, Bernhard de Kok