Ep45: Charlie Arnott's Regenerative Journey podcast - with Amelia Nolan

After an inspiring couple of days of biodynamic workshopping, Amelia sat down with Charlie Arnott for a yarn. As the sun set (in the west 😊) over the Alkina Old Quarter Homestead Amelia talked Charlie through her experiences, thoughts and learnings gleaned from a career in wine and a lifetime of travel.

It has all led up to the present day and this wonderful project here at Alkina, which employs so many of those learnings in how and why we farm the way we do, and what it means to be truly connected to the land.

If you haven’t tuned in to ‘The Regenerative Journey’ before, now is the time to change that. Charlie is a gentleman and a great communicator. So many great podcasts up there, especially the recent one with our friend Rebecca Sullivan of Warndu.

You can access the podcast via Charlie's website here, or just stream it via your podcast app. Enjoy!

Vintage 2021

(The vintage surprise: Red and White Semillon harvested together from one of our young blocks)

2021 represents an outstanding vintage for Alkina across our 43 hectares of organic and biodynamically grown vines in northern Greenock. We have seen elevated levels of natural acidity, tannin, flavour and colour thanks to the long, cool later part of the growing season.

Good early winter and early spring rains raised hopes of good soil moisture levels but overall this didn’t quite follow through and it was a dry season again. Post Christmas we were blessed with cool, even days and a long, slow, even ripening period where phenolic development was in line with both sugars and flavour.

We started picking Semillon on 20th February (a couple of days later than V20, which was early) and finished with Mataro on 31st March. We had a two week burst of busy picking at the start and then cool nights slowed everything down. Yields were very good for everything except Grenache, which suffered some losses during a hot, windy flowering period. Quality looks to be excellent across the board with firm tannins and intense flavour concentration suggesting these will be wines with very long futures ahead of them.

TASTING AUSTRALIA - Alkina Long Lunch with Charlie Arnott and Mark McNamara - Wed 5th May - SOLD OUT

TASTING AUSTRALIA: Alkina Long Lunch with Charlie Arnott and Mark McNamara - Wed 5th May, 11:00am – 4pm. Ticket: $175 - SOLD OUT

Discover Alkina, meet Charlie Arnott, enjoy a delicious long lunch and learn about organic and biodynamic winegrowing in Greenock in the Barossa's Western Ranges.

You'll walk the vineyard rows and explore soil pits, before enjoying canapés and a tasting of Alkina's rarest terroir wines. Alkina has undertaken a unique and detailed terroir study to identify tiny parcels of old vine Grenache and Shiraz planted on different rock and soils types within the vineyard. We hand pick and vinify these 'Polygons' separately and you'll be able to taste these special wines, see the rocks and understand the special relationship between place and wine.

Then it's onto a long table in the Courtyard for a fabulous 3 course meal cooked over fire by Barossa legend, Mark McNamara, featuring the very best local Barossa and SA produce and suppliers. With Alkina's wines matched to the food and with magnums flowing, we'll enjoy a yarn with Charlie as we go.

Charlie is an award-winning grazier from Boorowa, New South Wales, Australia, an educator and passionate advocate for Regenerative Farming practices. His family business has developed under Charlie’s guidance from a ‘conventional’, industrial high input mixed enterprise farm working against nature to a biodynamically principled holistically managed farm partnering with nature. His podcast - The Regenerative Journey - is compulsive listening.

Having only recently opened, Alkina is a new story on an old place. It’s a journey through ancient stones and soils, organic and biodynamic viticulture, small scale winemaking and the creation of unique micro-terroir wines, all grown and made on our estate in the Western Barossa ranges. Alkina seeks to make wine that is an expression of place; pure, authentic, terroir wines from healthy vines in healthy soils. Alkina sits on the traditional lands of the Ngadjuri people. We acknowledge the Ngadjuri people as the traditional owners of this land and we pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.

Tasting Australia: Alkina Long Lunch with Charlie Arnott and Mark McNamara

Wed 5th May

11:00am – 4pm

Ticket: $175 SOLD OUT

Dietary Requirements catered for.

Return transport can be arranged from Adelaide (at extra cost).

We’re digging…but where to?

Alkina is a big idea. The more we chase it, the more we try to define it, then the bigger this idea becomes.

We don’t know all the answers.

We don’t even know half of the questions.

What we do know, however, is that making good wine and putting it in a smart bottle isn’t enough for us. It might not be enough for a lot of drinkers anymore either. What a glass of wine tastes like is still crucial…but increasingly what that glass of wine stands for is catching up. 

Alkina is a 60 hectare farm, upon which we now have 43 hectares of vines with younger plantings accompanying the old. We focus on the Barossa’s heritage varieties that have found their natural home in the region – Grenache, Shiraz, Mataro and Semillon. We grow and make all Alkina wines on the farm, hand picking the grapes and moving them all of 200m to our small winery. The entire farm is managed using organic and biodynamic principles and two thirds of the farm was certified by NASAA (National Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia) in 2018. The remaining third is farmed exactly the same way and is awaiting certification. 

Our approach to winemaking is based on identifying, picking and separately vinifying a wide range of micro-terroirs. Over the course of this blog we’ll dissect this as we try to develop our understanding.

Working with terroir specialist Pedro Parra, we were able to map areas of the vineyard to reveal very specific parcels of vines that are unique in their geologies, each being on predominantly limestone, schist or clay bases. These small areas, some as small as 0.3ha in size, we call Polygons; and each has a unique and special character. We work with winemaker, Alberto Antonini, to either blend together the Polygons that complement each other or to keep separate the Polygons that stand firmly on their own. 

Central to all of our endeavours are soil health and plant and microbial diversity. We have cut out all synthetic chemicals and sought to understand the principles of regenerative agriculture and how they apply to a vineyard. This approach allows complex ecosystems above and below ground to develop naturally and flourish. A healthy, happy vineyard should be teeming with life. Nature loves complexity and abhors monoculture. 

Regenerative agriculture is a process of learning, trialling, problem solving and hopefully, ultimately, understanding. It takes a mindset shift, to say the least. Well we have made that commitment and we hope to be able to bring you along for the ride too.