This is the earliest vintage on record at Topper's Mountain. Fifteen years ago, we would have been picking right into May. Next week, Tannat comes in.
Climate change is reshaping vineyards around Australia and the world. The timing of harvests, the behaviour of vines, and the pressure placed on everyone working the land.
At Topper’s Mountain, these shifts have changed how we think about our work. How we farm, how we consume energy, and what responsibility we carry simply by operating on this land.
Climate Change Is Reshaping the Australian Harvest
The most obvious effect of climate change on viticulture is warmer temperatures. For us that means the entire growing cycle is happening earlier. Budding, flowering, fruit-set, veraison, and harvest are all taking place, 5-6 weeks sooner than they used to.
When you map our vintage dates across the full history of the vineyard, the signal is obvious. The start of harvest has been drifting earlier by roughly one to one-and-a-half weeks per decade. The end of vintage is also trending earlier – but slightly less so. That gap matters. It means the harvest window itself is quietly narrowing.
We chose this site specifically for its long, cool growing seasons; the extended ripening window that lets late varieties like Nebbiolo and Tannat develop real complexity. That window is narrowing. The 2026 vintage is the sharpest demonstration of that to date.
As a vineyard, we are at the front of climate change vulnerability. We feel it in the vine, in the fruit, in the calendar. And yet it’s not a clean, linear story. That’s what makes it genuinely complicated. The trend is real; earlier starts, tighter windows. But the variability hasn’t disappeared. Seasons like 2022–23 still blow out late, defying the baseline entirely. What we’re living with isn’t simple compression. It’s an earlier, moving, and less reliable target.
The nature of farming means emissions will never be reduced to zero — biological systems emit greenhouse gases as a function of their basic processes. A transition to low-emissions farming means implementing new technologies and practices wherever we can.
Topper’s Mountain’s road to being carbon neutral
In the Vineyard
We haven’t used pesticides since the year of planting. Synthetic fertilisers were replaced with composted organic cow manure sourced from the nearby Rangers Valley feedlot. A closed-loop approach to soil nutrition that returns organic matter to the land rather than introducing manufactured chemistry. We’ve stopped using undervine herbicides across the entire vineyard, with the only exception being around vines replanted after the 2019 Tingha Plateau bushfire, where young root systems need time to establish.
Over two decades of considered farming, we’ve built happier soils, healthier soils which hold carbon and fix nitrogen. They also hold more water, support microbial life, grow more resilient vines, and produce more expressive fruit. The benefits compound in every direction – which is precisely the point.
In the Winery
All of our wines are fermented using wild yeast from the vineyard. Farming without pesticides means don’t need to introduce any commercial yeast strains. Wild fermentation produces more complex, site-expressive wines, and it means one of the most critical stages of winemaking is driven entirely from within the property.
Our low-intervention winemaking philosophy means that for most of our wines, the only additive used across the entire winemaking process is a small amount of sulphur at bottling as a preservative. No fining agents. Minimal filtration. Nothing artificial introduced between vineyard and bottle.
Solar and Energy
We have solar systems at both the Topper’s Mountain vineyard and our Sydney cellar, directly reducing our reliance on fossil fuel electricity across all operations.
We’re also part of a Virtual Energy Network (VEN) — a system that allows households and businesses connected to solar to share and distribute renewable electricity, rather than simply feeding surplus back to the grid. Our Sydney solar panels generate up to 25.4kW at full capacity. Under the VEN, instead of that surplus disappearing into the network, we direct it to be used at Topper’s Mountain. Any remaining excess flowing on to other community customers and VEN members.
It’s a community-based renewable energy loop. And it gives us the ability to operate as effectively carbon neutral — not through offsets or accounting tricks, but through the real displacement of fossil fuel electricity with shared solar generation.
It even powers our EV charging station!
Tuning Into the Vines
Great wines are always about tuning into the terroir.
Tuning in to the environment. To the vines. To their needs, their signals, the specific ways they tell you what the season is doing to them and what they need in response. That kind of attention is what good farming has always demanded. Climate change makes it more urgent, more precise, and more important than ever before.
The practical decisions accumulate: organic soil health, wild fermentation, renewable energy, shared community power. None of them alone changes the trajectory. Together, over time, they add up to something that actually matters.
We know that no single farm resolves the challenge of agricultural emissions. The full transition requires policy support, economic incentives, and wide-scale adoption of low-emissions practices across the entire sector. We’re not waiting for those systems to arrive. We’re doing what we can, right now, with what we have.
The Nebbiolo is in. The Tannat comes next. The 2026 vintage is six weeks early — and we’re paying close attention.