Jamieson falls just outside the Upper Goulburn Wine Region -- hence the Victoria, unqualified, designation on the winelabel. Its climate is generally described as mild, with warm days and cool nights and an average of 900 mm of rain per year, most falling in winter and spring. Over the past decade, though the vineyard has had the occasional heavy downpour
early in the New Year, the period from January to April has tended to be dry. This has been a good thing from the disease point of view, although we have had to contend with heat waves, such as the one which occurred in the first two weeks of March 2008.
Wind can be severe in the Jamieson Valley. Westerlies are the problem; they can come at any time of year and gusts in excess of 100 kph are not unknown. It was for this reason that the trellising (which to ensure even insolation had to be aligned at right angles to the prevailing wind) was slung between poles thicker than normal. Hail too has threatened damage in the past. On one memorable summer afternoon in 2005, I watched a leaf-shredding curtain of hail advancing up the valley come to a miraculous halt ten metres short of the vineyard.
Frosts in which overnight temperatures fell to an unprecedented low occurred in late September and again in late October 2006. As a result 100% of the primary and then 100% of the secondary buds that season were destroyed. There was no 2007 vintage. It felt like a disaster at the time – this was the first frost damage to occur since the initial vines were 
planted in 1993. But when the Mount Terrible fires broke out in December 2006 and for six weeks a pall of acrid yellow smoke made the valley feel like the surface of Venus, the frost came to seem almost like a blessing. I had been envious of the few local growers who’d escaped the ravages of the spring frosts; now, witnessing the despair of friends whose seemingly promising wine tasted as if it’d been crushed in an ashtray, I was glad to have been spared false hope.
The bush burnt to within 5 metres of the vineyard fence in 2006. A lot of time was spent fighting fires that summer – but that was OK, with the crop lost there wasn’t much work to do. And then, in February 2009, it happened all over again when fires fanned by a fierce south-westerly wind came within 7 km of Jamieson and smoke irretrievably tainted the crop. The lesson was plain: in a valley in the lee of a densely forested mountain, the vineyard is vulnerable to fire and frost. Fire-fighting equipment must be kept in constant readiness, the cordon must be high and the undervine strip kept bare in springtime.
Such rational strategies, however, take no account of the brutal climatic cycles which characterise this land of drought and flooding plains. The vineyard was established at the start of a ten year 
drought. But now, with the coming of La Nina, our irrigation and canopy management practices have been called seriously into question.
Between September 2010 and April 2011, there was not one rain-free week in Jamieson. The lowermost areas of the vineyard flooded and early signs of Downy Mildew started to appear. It was only by assiduous spraying and the emergency installation of 600 metres of aggie pipe that I kept disease and vine losses to a minimum.
Frost, fire, drought and flood, hail and mildew, warnings of locusts heading south: to anyone considering putting in a vineyard, the only advice I can give, apart from the obvious DON’T - is to make the best of the good years, because they will have to see you through the bad ones.
