Grace Vineyard Vintage Report 2025

The world feels unsettled. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East continue and tension hangs in the air. People are quick to take sides and everything carries a bias. It’s hard to find calm in the middle. And yet, in Lebanon — Château Musar, Kfaraaya — and in Odesa a few producers still make wine. Through war, crisis and silence they keep going. It is not loud. It is not easy. But it is steady.

Here the market moves like a flame in a still room — restless, not chaotic; searching, not lost. The market feels full of options yet move slowly. Decision come slowly.

What’s the answer? No one knows for sure. Sentiment alone won’t fix it. But what else can we do besides hold hope? Maybe it’s not about fixing everything. Maybe it’s about staying lit, even when the air doesn’t move.

Winemaking and vineyard growing offer many options. The shape of a vintage is set in the vineyards: how much water each vine receives, how balanced the crop load is, how much sun the clusters get — these factors define the year’s character.

As usual for Shanxi, ripening carried rain in its calendar and we planned for it at every step. Yields were close to last year: small berries, with even phenolic ripeness across blocks. Probable alcohol reads a touch lower than recent vintages (2022, 2023, 2024, 2019 & etc) — a more delicate, tensile expression rather than sheer weight.

We began with Chardonnay on schedule and finished with Marselan and Cabernet Sauvignon in early October, picking around occasional showers and cool snaps. Those temperature drops preserved acidity and aromatic lift, and forced us to choose patience over haste. Nearly twenty years with Marselan & Aglianico have taught us to trust it: it finds balance in difficult seasons and gives reliable colour, ripeness and tannin without demanding intervention.

For Ningxia, the introduction of drip irrigation has altered the vineyard behaviour a little. Some early-ripening blocks shifted later; others showed amplified vigour. August and September rains complicated timing — whether they caused these shifts will take a few more seasons to judge.

We harvested in sequence, pausing when needed to allow further ripening even as temperatures fell after successive rains. Over time we’ve found that mild concentration in cool conditions develops slowly and often yields cleaner raisin notes than rapid sun shrivel.

Work ran smoothly this year. Thanks to favourable natural conditions, we completed the Shanxi harvest before Ningxia, allowing the team to focus on one region at a time. Fruit reception, sorting and press schedules were staged to keep lots separate; fermentations were cooler and slower, promoting gentle extraction while preserving fruits. We like to work with natural fermentations, they provide a different dimensions of flavor expression, and we used them for about half this year’s harvest. Those parcels were closely monitored with gentle temperature control and regular sensory checks, while the remainder used selected commercial yeasts for predictability.

New gin and cask series releases underline the crossover between our wine work and spirits. We explore this at a measured pace. In crafting gin, we think like a winegrowers. We’ve been exploring growing some of our own fruits and botanicals to give the spirits a stronger sense of place.

The whisky is ageing in the right direction. We sample barrels regularly to monitor progress and adjust as the spirit evolves. What excites us most is bringing our wine heritage into whisky: greater control over wine oak and the chance to season or treat barrels ourselves. These trials give us more levers to shape flavour while preserving the whisky’s own identity.

A long-planned collaboration with Bruichladdich Distillery marks a milestone, featuring 9-, 15- and 21-year expressions that carry a Grace Vineyard touch. These barrels speak of fruit, oak and an idea of place translated through spirit.

Distillation remains an art of nuance. Control matters, but so does listening — to the barrel, to the cut, to what the spirit wants to become. 

The 2024 wines and our 2023 blending work reflect the late drought in Shanxi; that influence is visible in the wines. For Ningxia, our slightly heavier cropping blocks and later-harvest fruit offer both freshness and solid backbone for our cross-regional blends wine – Deep Blue.

After many seasons of consistent practice, we prefer to keep things simple and minimal. That, we believe, best reveals vineyard character. Lush mid-palate weight across our series remains a recurring feature.

The 2025 wines are showing notable depth. Malolactic fermentation was underway as this summary was written. Each region’s character remains intact, though Ningxia displays a touch more fruit weight after a later-than-usual harvest to reach full phenolic ripeness. Acidity held up well through the extended hang time thanks to cool conditions. Major changes in the vineyard complicate work, but we welcome them as part of a learning cycle and a wothwhile challenge.

There is no clear ending this year — only a slow drift between tension and silence, between what is made and what find its place. Some feel held in place; others push ahead as if trying to outrun their own weight.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw. We stand somewhere in between — not fully adapting, not quite resisting. Watching the flame, and choosing, for now, to remain with it.

Life’s too short to drink bad wine.

Cheers,
Team Grace Vineyard