LUKE’S LEAP: was started as a leap of faith.
You’ve had a few hours sleep, and before the soreness from yesterday and the early morning thaw can shake itself out of your sleepy bones; you wake up, drag yourself out of bed and find new ways to torture your body.
As the dawn fog slowly starts to scatter at the first light of day, you find yourself spending hours walking through endless rows of grapevines; the good ones literally make the cut and find themselves in baskets marked for the crush.
After hours of careful selection and cuttings, basket loads of prized fruit are carried back to the winery; you now find yourself covered from head to toe in dirt and dust, and realize it’s lunchtime, and you still haven’t gotten your first coffee of the day into you.
But before you can pour yourself a cup of morning pleasure, you find yourself rolling, lifting and rearranging wine barrels, dragging long, heavy hoses, from one fermentation tank to another – and cursing the world.
Why stop now? With the sound of forklifts and delivery trucks filling the air…and with infinite rows of barrels of fermenting crushed grapes awaiting you; You grab a hand plunger and hand stir each and every barrel for what seems like an eternity.
Covered in sticky grape skins, muscles burning, back aching, and hands so stained in deep purple, it takes days to get the color out; your much coveted palate, covered in dust and sweat decides to finally get that coffee you have been dreaming of…but you realize 9pm and just an hour until dinner… which means its time for the Luke’s leap.
Trotting out of the winery, though the vines, and down the hill, towards the Billabong, where the kangaroos gather for a late afternoon drink. You dodge a vine here, a kangaroo there, and if you are lucky enough to get a footing on the rock at the edge of the watering hole, you can leap high into the air – tossing yourself into back flip…and just managing to get out a quick “WOOOOooohoo!”, which ends in a big splash.
With a total Immersion of invigorating cool liquid silence, you hold your breath- and the moment – for as long as your lungs can hold it for. When you resurface, the world seems a calmer and more refreshing place. You know, that if you had listened to your parents, life could have been easier. You could have been a high profile lawyer, an investment banker, surgeon, (or WWF cage ring wrestler, or big wave surfer) and live in a big house on Sydney Harbor…but for the moment you live in the back of a winery….and that’s because you took a leap of faith and choose to listen to your heart, to roll the dice, and to take a crack at making some of the Hunter Valley’s most exciting and innovative wines. And when you get back up to the winery, with the excitement and passion of the crush buzzing in the air, you know why you love what you do, and you thrive to bottle that passion and share that love with the world!
Anyhow, if you had become a surgeon, odds are pretty good that you wouldn’t have been able to stop work and sneak in a quick leap into the billabong. Now that’s something you can’t do in the middle of surgery! We wouldn’t recommend late lunch leaps into billabongs, but we would recommend taking a bottle of Luke’s Leap home with you – and sharing the passion with the ones you love!