Our Vineyard

The Cumulus Estate vineyard is located near Orange New South Wales, which lies at the foot of Mount Canobolas, approximately 250km west of Sydney. Situated on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Ranges, this region boosts some of Australia's highest altitude vineyards.

So why does elevation matter? While our wines all have personalities of their own, one characteristic they share is wonderfully bright, vibrant fruit. The vineyards' altitude plays a huge part in this, for a few reasons:

- The higher you get the cooler it gets. The lower temperatures mean that grapes take a bit longer to ripen, giving us time to get the evenness right across the bunches. This enables us to avoid the jammy, overripe characters you sometimes see in warmer climate wines.

- The higher you are, the greater the intensity of sunlight. While the temperature  is not as high as other parts of Australia, the UV readings certainly are.This helps us grow fruit with great intensity of flavour.

The quality of our wines begin in the vineyard with an ancient combination of rich volcanic soils over a limestone base provides an excellent structure for well-balanced vine growth.

Our 508 hectare vineyard, planted in 1995, gently rises and falls across a range of altitudes and slopes above and below an elevationof 600m above sea level - thereby traversing both the Orange and Central Ranges Geographical Indication (GI) wine regions. In such unique surroundings our multi-regional vineyard provides a blend of elevation, terrain, soil and aspect and allows us to make our wines from estate-grown fruit-controlling everything from 'bud to bottle'. 

The grapes from our CUMULUS and CLIMBING wine ranges are sourced from the portion of the vineyard where the altitude is above 600 metres (which falls squarely into the Orange GI or appellation).
The remaining vineyard area produces the grapes for the ROLLING wines in the Central Ranges region located 10-20m lower in elevation.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SUSTAINABILITY... We are 100 per cent estate-grown, so we are totally reliant on this land to create our wines. Our vineyard sustainability practices aim to optimise healthy, balanced vines that deliver purity of fruit and fine tannin structure with minimal intervention. Various techniques for water and soil conservation, recycling and the use of 'soft' spray products all contribute to care for our vineyard with minimal impact on the environment. Exclusive use of frip irrigation, inter-row mulching and organic composting underpins our philosophy in the vineyard. Trials with biodynamic methods on some blocks are being evaluated and will be expanded if quality and sustainability are enhanced.