The Staete Landt Vineyard is designed to produce single vineyard, hand made wines with complexity through thorough use of clone, rootstock and soil variation. We carefully designed the vineyard around the styles of wines we wanted to produce, not the reverse. Our major focus is on the vineyard where healthy, balanced vines, will in turn deliver consistently ripe fruit with distinct Marlborough flavours. Through shoot thinning, bunch thinning and manual leaf plucks we concentrate on low yields in order to grow intensely flavoured grape berries. The Marlborough Environmental Award 1999 was awarded to our vineyard for the successful implementation of an intricate irrigation design taking into consideration soil characteristics, grape varietals and scarce water resources. In other words: from an environmental perspective the implementation of the vineyard design proved to be an example for other future vineyard developments. Our vineyard's close proximity to the Wairau river, the main river in the Marlborough valley, produces a continuous airflow which keeps frosts away at crucial times during the grape growing season from budburst (September/October) through to harvest (March/April). The combination of the location of the vineyard, the stony riverbed soils and the heavier soils on the southern part of the vineyard enable us to produce single vineyard wines with depth and different layers of flavours.