Mims Vineyard
Our Vineyard is located in Moorooduc in Victoria on the northern end of the Mornington Peninsula. Moorooduc's great advantage over the rest of the Mornington Peninsula is that it's temperature is a few degrees warmer and we can ripen out the later grapes such as Cabernet, Shiraz, and Riesling.
The first vines were planted in 1999 (Shiraz) and the Muscat followed the year after in 2000.
The trellis system employed here is Scott Henry; this is a type of vertical shoot positioning (VSP) where the canopy is tucked in a thin vertical canopy but with Scott Henry there are two separate canopies coming from two separate main cordons, one up and one down. From a vine training point of view the upward canopy is easy because that's generally where they want to go but the downward canopy is like trying to get your kids to listen to reason ( do-able but takes a LOT of work) and so we usitlise wires to get them to go where we want them to go. The end result of all this hard work is more flavoursome wine. 
There are two blocks in our vineyard, the Shiraz and the Muscat.
The Shiraz is incredibly vigorous in growth and suits Scott Henry very well. The idea is to have a good balance of canopy and fruit and if the canopy is out of control in growth then the grapes tend to suffer a bit. The shiraz canopy tends to have its full canopy by the end of December whereas the Muscat isn't there until the end of January or even February. If you grow shiraz you tend to spend your thinking time wandering how to slow it down wherewas most other varieties are the other way around. The photo on the right was taken in late November only weeks after budburst.
The Muscat is a very interesting grape, it seems to always start out scraggy then in mid December the growth comes. It's a versatile grape in that you can produce very different styles from a light Moscato, to a full bodied sweet wine such as a frontignac right through to a fortified muscat. We produce a Moscato and a fortified. The fortified has been sitting in a baroque per vintage for two vintages. At some stage when we have 4 or 5 vintages we will blend it with a solero system. That is where you take a set amount from a number of vintages to produce a very special blend smoothed by all those variations in the vintages. By the time the first vintage runs out the next one in line has had enough time in the barrel to stand tall alongside the older vintages. 
Having a vineyard in your backyard is hard work sometimes but it also has its rewards. There is nothing finer than coming home from your day job on a warm balmy autumn night when the grapes are ripe and sampling the crop. At that stage the grapes are incredibly sweet and more than satisfies the sweetest of sweet toothes.