2006 was Mt Terrible’s first commercial vintage. It had been a great season in the Jamieson Valley, with good spring rain and a hot mid-summer giving way to somewhat cooler but still dry conditions in February and March. We harvested six tonnes of grapes on a cold day in the first week of April. This wine, which is drinking beautifully, was 
awarded 95 points by James Halliday. To view article featured in the Weekend Australian Newspaper click here.
The 2007 season was a catastrophe. On the morning of Monday September 25th, two days after bud-burst, I awoke to find the ground thick with ice and the cordons outlined with hoarfrost. The following four nights the story was the same, with temperatures falling as low as -8 deg C. For three weeks thereafter the vines were stunned into dormancy, then the secondary buds began to appear – mainly on the underside of the cordon, but at least life was returning. A week later three more black frosts struck. Not one bud survived. Vines are tough, it takes a lot to kill them. In many cases the wood of the upper segment of the cordon was killed, but the plants put out new canes and by Xmas there were again leaves.
The mountain, however, wasn’t finished yet. At the beginning of December it really lived up to its name when dry lightning started the fires that were ultimately to destroy over a million hectares of bush. In the minds of those who lived through them, the memory of the next six weeks is a blur: constant alarms and excursions,
fires on Mt Terrible, at Kevington, Woods Point and Gaffney’s Creek, then Mt Buller and Tolmie. For a month there were four strike teams stationed at Jamieson and the survival of the township itself was several times in question.
The 2008 season started well with good spring rains. Fruit set was excellent – all the more so considering the damage the previous year’s frost had done to the cordons. Summer was warm rather than hot; the grapes were ripening well, but then in late February two weeks of 40 degree temperatures accelerated the process undesirably, and rapidly increasing sugars made it necessary to pick earlier than planned. The best of this vintage is now available as the Ian Ridley Reserve (94 points from James Halliday - to view article click here); the rest we are holding back to release in place of the lost 09 vintage.
2009 was another deeply demoralising year. After poor fruit set due to a cold snap at flowering, a reduced but otherwise very promising crop was ruined as a result of the February bushfires. Two weeks after Black Saturday, the Kilmore East – Murrindindi Fire came extremely close to Jamieson, only to be stopped at the last minute by a change in the weather. The smoke, however, had already done for the crop. A 5 day trial maceration revealed guaiacol and 4-methyl guaiacol levels totalling 8 parts per million so no grapes were picked. But no one in Jamieson died in the fires.
The 2010 season was blessedly uneventful. 
A dryish spring and a dry summer made for a near perfect and disease-free crop which was picked in late March.
2011: if the every-other-year pattern that seemed to be emerging ran true to form, things looked grim. They were. It started raining in September 010 and it didn’t stop until April 011. Springs that had never before existed popped up all over the vineyard and the war against mildew was unremitting. And yet, when so many elsewhere in the state lost their crop to disease, over 8 tonnes of clean grapes with sugars of just under 14% and with excellent acidity were harvested in the second week in April. And more important than the chemistry, the slower than usual ripening conditions had strikingly enhanced their flavour. Against all expectation, a very auspicious first vintage to be made on site.
