Winery to produce beer after losing crop to smoke taint

Ravensworth Wines took the opportunity to produce fruit beer and collaborated with Sydney based Wildflower Brewing and Blending to produce 8,000 litres of beer across five varieties.

"The fruit macerations and beer refermentations are taking place at our vineyard in Murrumbateman," Mr Martin said.

"The beer will be drained off the grapes in November and go to the brewery in Marrickville for bottling and conditioning.

READ MORE: Winery loses crop to smoke, makes gin instead

"We had supplied Wildflower brewing with grapes for the base of some of their fruit beers earlier.

"We will now make a bigger ranger of fruit beers using our estate-grown organic fruit. The smoke taint isn't as evident in a beer as in a wine."

The family-owned business, which has been running for 18 years, has been operating out of their vineyard and winery in Murrumbateman. They source fruits from the Canberra, Hilltops, Tumbarumba, and Gundagai districts.

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However, after the crops in these regions were affected due to smoke taint, they decided to not produce any wine there.

"We purchased fruit in Western Australia and Tasmania to make a few small batches of wine far away from the fires," Mr Martin added.

After losing the crop to smoke taint, winemakers are now looking at other opportunities for their produce.

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Canberra District winery, Four Winds Vineyard, teamed up with The Canberra Distillery to make a Riesling gin.

Four Winds Vineyard CEO, Sarah Collingwood, said that it was heartbreaking to abort the harvest due to the high levels of smoke taint from the bushfires.

"After 12 months tending to the vines, pruning, shoot-thinning, and fruit-dropping, we couldn't bear letting all the grapes go to waste," she said.

"We ran through the options of things we could make grape jelly, verjuice, brandy or gin. For us, gin made the most sense."

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