1968

Sauternes 1968 : Le temps est frais et sec de mai à août. Septembre a été deux fois plus froid que d’habitude et très humide. Les raisins ont montré une bonne concentration et les vendanges ont eu lieu tous les jours à partir du 30 septembre. Cependant, les niveaux idéaux de sucre n’ont pas été atteints avant le 15 octobre. De fortes pluies les 24 et 25 ont interrompu les vendanges et un 4ème passage a été effectué juste avant la Toussaint. Les raisins cueillis en novembre ont été utilisés pour faire Y. Du début à la fin, la récolte a nécessité 41 jours de travail. Les fruits ont fini par être de très bonne qualité – grâce au fait que plus de la moitié a été rejetée lors du tri.

1968 was a good year for Italian heavyweight wines such as Barolo and Brunello. Whilst Bordeaux suffered from a poor vintage, 1968 marked somewhat of a renaissance for Italian wines particularly those from Tuscany and Piedmont. 1968 was the vintage that Sassicaia was first offered on the open market. 
 

Poor weather in Bordeaux throughout the growing and harvest seasons led to a small, low quality, vintage. Most of the 1968 wine produced was consumed within a few years of the vintage and very few examples exist today. Those that still exist are well into decline and are unlikely to be of good drinking.

Champagne / Dreadful year, with heavy spring frosts, followed by hail, then rot, that produced thin, mean wines used for blending at best

Australia /  A long and very difficult vintage which reduced yields by 50% to an average of 3.0 tonnes/ha. This was caused by a very dry growing season (Nuriootpa received less than half of its normal rainfall), a very hot, dry January with only a little relief from 25mm of rain in January and February. These conditions produced low Baume white wines and light red wines.

In 1968 there were 6,934 hectares of vineyards in Barossa and 20,971 tonnes of wine grapes were crushed in that vintage.

New rootstocks were released in South Australia (Ramsey, 1613 and Dogridge) providing new options for growers facing nematode, salinity or vigour problems. A number of new varieties also became available after many years of grower action. These included Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Tokay, Sauvignon Blanc and Alicante Bouchet.

Irrigation research and soil moisture management was now becoming a major area of research at the Department of Agriculture’s Nuriootpa Research Station.

In winemaking, pectolytic enzymes were now widely used. Mechanisation had progressed in refrigeration, where screw compressors were now being used, and in packaging as AGM supplied the first palletised, sterile packed bottles for Orlando’s new high speed, fully automatic sterile bottling plant which was commissioned in 1968.

The 1967 Penfolds Grange Hermitage won the 1968 Jimmy Watson Trophy.

1968 In both Europe and America Japanese imported cars and other goods were continuing to rise and trouble the governments of UK and USA as they worried about industries in their own countries being effected and jobs lost. In the spring of 1968 on 4th April The Rev Martin Luther King was assassinated and Robert Kennedy was mortally wounded when he is shot by Sirhan Sirhan. The peace movement had continued to grow and more and more Americans were against the war in Vietnam, and once again more riots occurred throughout cities in America. The music scene was once again set by the "Beatles" and the "Rolling Stones" , and fashion flirted with see through blouses and midis and maxis skirts joined the Mini Skirt as part of the fashion trends. There is a Flu Pandemic in Hong Kong and the first Black power salute is seen on Television worldwide during an Olympics medal ceremony