Category Archives: People

These days Canberra and shiraz is a no-brainer for aspiring vignerons. It’s our most successful grape variety thanks, initially, to Clonakilla, but now thoroughly bedded down across the district.

But when Greg and Libby Gallagher planted shiraz at Murrumbateman in 1995, Canberra’s reputation for fine wine was a fraction of what it is now – and shiraz had barely emerged as a contender for top spot.

Clonakilla founder, Dr John Kirk, included shiraz among the many varieties he planted in the early 1970s. But until 1990 it joined cabernet sauvignon in the blending vat. That impressive first vintage won two gold medals and two trophies – guaranteeing shiraz a solo role in future Clonakilla vintages. Well, almost.

Four years earlier, Kirk and his son Jeremy had planted viognier – a Rhone Valley white variety. They believed it suited the climate and would a point of difference in the market.

Then, in 1991 while the second Clonakilla shiraz lay in barrel, Melbourne-based Tim Kirk, having completed his Diploma of Education, headed off to France where I’d organised an appointment for him with Marcel Guigal, one of the Rhone’s great winemakers.

There he tasted Guigal’s stunning single vineyard Cote-Roties (blends of shiraz and viognier): the 1988 vintages of La Mouline and La Landonne from barrel and the 1987 La Turque from bottle.

Tim described the meeting and tasting as a “transforming moment”. “Transfixed and delighted” by the perfume and sheer dimension of Guigal’s wines, he decided, “I’ve got to get this shiraz-viognier thing going back home”.

From the 1992 vintage Tim and John Kirk included viognier in the blend in varying proportions: starting at one per cent each in 1992 and 1993, rising to four per cent in 1994, peaking at ten per cent in 1995 and 1996, then falling back to smaller percentages thereafter.

Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier’s reputation grew rapidly, and by early in the new century had won acclaim from leading international critics, including the USA’s Robert M. Parker and UK’s Jancis Robinson. But when the Gallaghers planted shiraz in 1995, the Kirks had barely begun the shiraz viognier journey. Indeed, it would be another two years before Tim Kirk from Melbourne to Canberra to run Clonakilla full time.

The Kirks came to shiraz through trial and error. But the Victorian based Gallaghers put Canberra and shiraz together “after doing climatic data searches for about two years, looking for the best area to grow shiraz”, says their website.

They purchased land at Murrumbateman and in 1995, with Greg still making wine for Taltarni in central Victoria, established a vineyard overlooking the Murrumbidgee Valley and Brindabellas. They believed this site would produce the elegant, multi-layered shiraz they had in mind.

As the vines grew, Greg continued with Taltarni until 1998, then from 1999 to 2004 trained young winemakers at Charles Sturt University, Wagga. During this period he also established Canberra Winemakers, in partnership with Rob and Kay Howell of Jeir Creek. The business continues to make wine at Jeir Creek for growers in and around Canberra.

As their vineyard matured, the Gallaghers launched their own label, making the wines at Jeir Creek. They established a cellar door at the vineyard, on Dog Trap Road, and offered their own delicious cheeses, made on site by Libby (a skill she learned at Charles Sturt Uni).

Greg’s expertise with sparkling wine, developed at Taltarni, opened a unique opportunity, first for Canberra Winemakers, then for the Gallaghers. Initially, Canberra Winemakers prepared base wines for others to turn into bubblies. But Gallagher, seeing the opportunity to complete the process, established a sparkling cellar adjacent to his cellar door.

The cellar, with two computerised gyro palates and bottling line, allows Gallagher to clarify bottles of sparkling wine following secondary fermentation, top them up and seal the bottles for market.

The Gallaghers currently offers two bottle-fermented sparklers under their own label – Duet Pinot Noir Chardonnay NV (pinot from Mount Majura Vineyard, chardonnay from Gallagher vineyard) and Blanc de Blanc 2007 (all from Gallagher vineyard).

These are both fine, delicate wines – the sort you can make only if all the bits line up: vineyard management, harvest timing, fruit handling, winemaking, maturation and finishing off. Clearly, it’s a valuable skill for Canberra to have. But it’s not the cutting edge stuff we see from much cooler areas like Tasmania. So, good as they are, bubblies won’t put Canberra on the wine map. That role remains principally with shiraz – which is were this story started.

The Gallaghers came to Canberra for shiraz and, indeed, it became the district hero. And just four years after establishing their shiraz vines – they finished planting on their 16th wedding anniversary – Greg made the first wine from them.

1999 was the year BRL Hardy trucked grapes from South Australia to help Canberra vignerons wiped out by the October 1998 frost. A mass of cold air had moved up from Antarctica on a wide front, nipping vines in the bud across Victoria, South Australia and southern New South Wales.

The Gallaghers lost all but three tonnes of their anticipated 20 tonne shiraz crop. But in a recent ten-year retrospective of Gallagher shirazes, the 1999 drank beautifully – to my tasted the best of the older wines, and on a par with the vibrant 2006, my pick of the younger vintages.

The 1999 stood out for its amazingly youthful colour, round, juicy, mellow, maturing fruit flavours and soft tannins – probably very much the style the Gallaghers hoped for when they came to Canberra.

The browning 2000 vintage hadn’t held up nearly so well. But the 2001, while mature, still showed maturing plummy, spicy varietal flavours, in a slightly leaner style than the 1999.

The 2002 looked good, 2003 combined both prune-like over-ripe flavours and a touch of greenness, and the 2005 seemed a touch tart in the finish. The 2004 failed to please. But the 2006, 2007 and 2008 all looked good in their own ways.

While neither completely young, nor mature, the 2006 showed a tremendous vitality and intensity of dark berry and spice flavours with a supple mid palate and lovely soft tannins.

While 2007 lacked the intensity and weight of the 2006, it remains vibrant and fresh with a delicious interplay between the fruit and spicy oak. The current release 2008 seems fuller and riper again even than the 2006 ­– a big wine in the medium-bodied Canberra style.

The 1999 and later vintages, especially 2006, show that the Gallaghers backed the right variety in shiraz and when they get it right, it’s of a very high calibre. They didn’t plant our other district specialty, riesling. But Greg makes a brilliant riesling using fruit from the Four Winds Vineyard (see a full review next week).

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2012 First published 22 February 2012 in The Canberra Times

This is the story of the little winery that weathered the storm of the great, shrinking, Hardy empire – and emerged as one of Australia’s leading producers of chardonnay and pinots noir and gris.

Bay of Fires, at Pipers River Tasmania, grew out of BRL Hardy’s quest for great sparkling wine. Sparkling specialist, Ed Carr, searched all the likely cool growing sites in south-eastern Australia – including nearby Tumbarumba, the Adelaide Hills, the coldest reaches of the Yarra Valley and further south, in Tasmania.

All of those places produced pinot noir and chardonnay, and even small amounts of pinot meunier, suited to delicate, flavoursome sparkling wines. But nothing equalled the fruit from Tasmania.

This was a period of great expansion for BRL Hardy, buoyed by booming exports, and, for a time, a shortage of suitable grapes. During the boom, the price of wine assets ballooned, peaking in 2003 when Constellation Brands USA bought publicly listed Hardys for $1.9 billion.

As wine assets deflated later in the decade, Constellation offloaded assets, including the historic Leasingham Winery and several vineyards in the Clare Valley and the massive Stonehaven winery on the Limestone Coast. Finally, in February 2011 it sold an 80 per cent stake in the business to Champ Private Equity for $290 million – crystallising a massive loss on its original investment.

Winemaker Fran Austin and the crew at Bay of Fires (founded 2002) kept their heads down during the crisis. They retained their 22-hectare vineyard adjacent to the winery. And under Ed Carr’s supervision they continued making table and sparkling wine components from across Tasmania.

The network of Tasmanian vineyards established by Carr, originally for sparkling wine, had pretty quickly contributed to the company’s best multi-region table wines – notably Hardy’s flagship white, Eileen Hardy Chardonnay. That Tasmania  contributed the major component to one of Australia’s finest whites remained virtually unknown.

The Bay of Fires label, however, provided a face for the Tasmanian wines. And the release of the magnificent 2009 pinot noir, a trophy winner at Canberra’s 2010 National Wine Show of Australia, left no doubt about where the state’s strength lay.

By this time, little known even in the trade, the company had developed a flagship pinot noir under the Eileen Hardy label – made at Bay of Fires but transferred to headquarters in Reynella, South Australia. It was lost in the turmoil of Constellation’s final years. But we’ll see it before too long.

Fran Austin recently left Bay of Fires, handing the winemaking over to Peter Dredge and his assistant, Karl Schultz. They work closely with Ed Carr and Carr’s boss, Paul Lapsley, chief winemaker for the Accolade group.

Accolade’s presence in Tasmania – driven by a wide search for Australia’s best chardonnay and pinot noir (whether for table or sparkling wine) – lends practical support to the contentious argument that high latitude, near sea level, delivers better wine quality than high altitude. Dr John Gladstone reaches a similar conclusion in Wine, Terroir and Climate Change (Wakefield Press, South Australia, 2011).

Whatever the merits of the argument, the current Bay of Fires wines reveal just how at home chardonnay and pinots noir and gris are in a variety of sites around Tasmania. They also reveal an emerging mastery of winemaking that brings out the best in these varieties. That these remain largely undiscovered wines is reflected in the comparatively modest prices for wines of this calibre.

Bay of Fires Pinot Gris 2011 $24.69–$36.50 Fruit source: Lower Derwent 40 per cent; Coal River Valley 39 per cent; Upper Derwent 21 per cent. This is the best Australian pinot gris I’ve tasted – lively and fresh with intense pear-like varietal aroma and flavour, backed by a rich, silky texture. Winemaker Peter Dredge attributes the rich texture to a component of the wine undergoing wild-yeast ferment in older oak barrels.

Bay of Fires Chardonnay 2009 $29.95–$40.50 Fruit source: Pipers River 31 per cent; East Coast 29 per cent; Coal River Valley 40 per cent. The age reflects slow sales rather than a marketing plan. But it’s a plus in this sensational wine. Succulent, racy, lemony acidity pulls the many flavour components together in this full-bodied, taut, deeply layered, richly textured, barrel-fermented dry white wine. Should develop well for many more years.

Bay of Fires Pinot Noir 2010 $29.45–$42.99 Fruit source: Derwent Valley 55 per cent; East Coast 30 per cent; Coal River Valley 15 per cent. This fairly deeply coloured pinot reveals quite a lot of the pinot flavour and aroma spectrum. A light, “stalky” overlay suggests whole bunches, including stems, in the ferment. Behind that comes aromatic waves of varietal fruit characters, ranging from strawberry to plum – adding up to what can only be called “pinosity”. The rich, supple, elegant, tightly structured palate reflects the aroma.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2012 First published 15 February 2012 in The Canberra Times

On 9 January, Canberra lost Len Sorbello – a wine-loving bloke, loved and respected across the wine industry and among former public service workmates.

Laughter lightened the farewell service as brother Sam, old wine mate, Lester Jesberg, and elder son, Stephen, recounted a very full, generous life infused with an infectious, passion for wine and food.

Stephen said, “If dad wasn’t eating, he was thinking of eating. If he wasn’t cooking, he was thinking of cooking”.  He recalled a monumentally littered kitchen and six o’clock dinners starting at nine.

Brother Sam remembered Len’s early food infatuation, indulged lavishly by a Sicilian mother. Black muscat juice accompanied meals, said, Sam. But this gave way to Barossa Pearl and Ben Ean during Len’s youth in north Queensland.

By the time Sorbello, by now a barrister, met Lester Jesberg in 1976, his wine tastes had moved up a notch. Recalls Jesberg, “Len was a year ahead of me in wine at the time and for a beginner that was a big gap. He was already into the great wines of Europe”.

“It was at a Rothbury Estate ribbon dinner in Canberra”, Jesberg remembers. “I introduced myself to Len and his table and many of those people, including Mike and Maggie Bond, were there the other day [at the funeral]”.

“We just clicked”, says Jesberg – and Sorbello offered to host a tasting for him. “I’ll show you some real wines”, he said, shortly thereafter treating Jesberg to an extraordinary line up of 1970 Bordeaux reds – all the first growths plus Chateau Cheval Blanc. Jesberg joined Sorbello’s tasting group, based initially on the Rothbury Estate ribbon tastings.

This dragged the two into the orbit of Murray Tyrrell, owner of Tyrrell’s Wines, and the legendary Len Evans, driving force behind Rothbury. Over many trips to the Hunter and endless tastings, Sorbello and Jesberg earned their prestigious purple ribbons – Rothbury’s highest accolade.

I met Len Sorbello during this period in the late seventies, for me a period of intense wine exploration with David Farmer of Farmer Brothers. We tasted largely separately from the Sorbello-Jesberg group, but knew them well, tasted together on occasion and sold them heaps of wine.

I recall early on Farmer saying, “Len’s got a great white palate”, something I came to appreciate over the next thirty years as we ate, drank and, eventually, judged together.

What I also saw in Len a great joy in drinking wine. He’d analyse, dissect, and discuss it endlessly, but finally it was a drink to be savoured to the hilt, with food. And that’s what he did.

Bruce Tyrrell, son of the late Murray Tyrrell, met Sorbello and Jesberg in the late seventies. He said, “We’d get on the drink in the Hunter and have a lot of fun”. He recalls the pair impressing Murray with their palates.

The Sorbello-Jesberg group maintained the passion and in 1985 founded “Winewise” magazine. Jesberg became the editor largely, he says, because Sorbello by now was married, had two sons and wanted to give them plenty of time.

Bruce Tyrrell believed that Winewise could become “Australia’s answer to Robert M. Parker [all-powerful American wine critic] if the industry would get behind it”.

Tyrrell said, “These guys were not full-time industry pros, but they had tremendous knowledge, they were completely independent and there was no bullshit in any of them”.

In 1990, the Winewise team, established the Small Vignerons Award, designed especially for boutique wineries unable or unwilling to enter larger shows. It’s now one of Australia’s most prestigious events, attracting our bests show judges and a broad representation from small makers.

Sorbello judged at the awards from the outset, building on an already formidable palate and winning tremendous respect among judges. He held strong views, argued his point but always listened and finally accepted any outcome with good humour.

Sorbello’s wine passion spilled into a successful public service legal career, culminating as head of legal services at Comcare. A colleague, Ken Whitcombe, said Len brought his enthusiasm for wine and food to work – a gusto that meant large wine bills whenever Len organised a staff lunch. This caused some nervousness among less well-paid staff.

“Len was constitutionally incapable of ordering a bottle of wine that cost less than the rest of the meal put together”, says Whitcombe. But Whitcombe also observed in Len a similar gusto for family, friends and career. And he recalls Len hosting a dinner for work colleagues at his own home, cooking “one of the most delightful meals they’d ever had” and digging into his private cellar.

The ever-ebullient Len put wine at the centre of a generous life, sharing his knowledge, enthusiasm and precious bottles with work colleagues, family, friends and many contacts in the wine industry. He put wine and food where it belonged – on a shared table with family and friends.

Len Sorbello’s life ended in a tragic irony – he died suddenly while travelling to visit his terminally ill mother in Townsville. The day before he’d held court at Adrienne Jesberg’s 60th birthday celebrations in Sydney with 40 or so old wine friends. “Len loved an audience”, says Lester Jesberg. We’ll all miss you Len.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 20112 First published 1 February 2012 in The Canberra Times

The Jimmy Watson trophy is to wine drinkers what the Melbourne Cup is to once a year punters. We’ve all heard of it. There’s a buzz each year as the Melbourne show unveils the latest winner. And for the winner, especially if it’s a little known winery, victory can be a fast track to glory.

This year the coveted crystal and silver jug travelled to Tasmania for the first time, won by Nick Glaetzer for his Mon Pere Shiraz 2010, a blend from the Tamar and Coal River Valleys.

By my reckoning, it’s only the fourth wine in the trophy’s 50-year history to have been the final, bottled product at the time of judging. Until recently the line up was the domain of raw young reds not due for blending, let alone bottling, for many months. I detail below why this was so – and why it made the Jimmy Watson not only Australia’s best-known wine award but also its most reviled by critics, including me.

Even before recent changes to the class rules by the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria, and to the trust deed by the Watson family, bottled exhibits had represented an ever-greater proportion of entries. These had risen to 75–80 per cent of the total by 2009. The shift resulted from a run of earlier vintages, wines spending less time in oak, shifting the judging from July to October, and the show’s decision to admin two-year olds into the ranks.

This year, however, following sustained lobbying from within the industry and columns like this, the rules changed for the better. An RASV press release from June 2011 states, “New in 2011, the Jimmy Watson classes will accept bottled wines only and will continue to include one and two-year-old red wines. Wines entered into the Watson classes this year are eligible to be put forward by judges into other red classes, providing the wines with further opportunities to win varietal trophies”.

The latter change benefited Nick Glaetzer’s Mon Pere Shiraz, which went on to win a second trophy as best “Rhone style or shiraz”.

The trophy now rewards wines fundamentally different from those that triumphed in the early years – a shift from rewarding the big, bold and immature to the bright, fruity and approachable. It’s a natural progression. But it’s worth reflecting, too, on the trophy’s origins.

In 1962 Jimmy Watson, wine merchant, died. At his funeral, a hat passed amongst Watson’s loyal followers, raising funds to sponsor an annual “Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy” for the best one-year-old red wine at the Melbourne Wine Show.

There are those who still remember Jimmy with fondness – none more so than his son Alan as he presides, with his son, over the Jimmy Watson Wine Bar founded by his father all those years ago.

But somewhere along the way, the trophy took on a life of its own – a farcical, commercial life far removed from the world Jimmy Watson inhabited during his lifetime.

Alan Watson remembers his father as a wine pioneer – a man who cheerfully weathered the sneers of some fellow Australians for nothing more than encouraging the consumption of table wine with food. In those days wine was just plonk.

Bill Chambers, maker of superb Rutherglen fortifieds and long-term chair of judges at the Melbourne wine show, once told me that he recalled Watson’s Wine bar in the late 1950s. There were bottles everywhere as a leather-apronned Jimmy, a great showman, worked with two rubber tubes to bottle a hogshead of red before lunch – an enviable feat in Chamber’s view, and one Jimmy Watson was proud of.

In those days Bill Chambers worked up in the Clare Valley with the Stanley Wine Company. He remembers Melbourne Wine Merchant, Doug Seabrook, buying hogsheads of raw young Clare Valley reds, many of which he sold to Watson. By all accounts it was these vigorous young reds, and not only those from Clare, that interested him most of all.

In an interview some years back, Alan Watson told me that his father’s business was not originally a watering hole as it is today, but a bottle shop where the owner selected and bottled everything himself. But Watson’s great enthusiasm attracted a ring of disciples. They soon began bringing food to the shop and adopting a liberal interpretation of licensing laws that permitted patrons to taste wine before purchasing.

The clientele, enthralled by Watson, showman and extrovert, came from all walks of life. But with Melbourne University just up the road from Watson’s Lygon Street premises, academics and students swelled his ranks of followers. Eagerly they swallowed his message.

“Dad tried to move the trade into another era”, reminisced Alan Watson. “He wanted wine to be seen as an everyday occurrence, something to be consumed with meals”. He also urged patience, encouraging customers to cellar the immature, purple, one-year-old reds that were the bulk of his trade.

Jimmy Watson was an educator of old and young alike according to Bill Chambers, long-time chair of the Melbourne show. “Students, professors, everyone brought their tucker down the road before heading up to Watson’s to drink wine. But he was a showman and I can’t remember him drinking much himself”.

Watson’s senior disciples, mostly academics and businessmen, gravitated to an upstairs room, eventually dubbed by Watson as “The House of Lords”. It was these most ardent and articulate followers who passed the hat at Jimmy Watson’s funeral, thus perpetuating his name in the Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy to be awarded to the robust, year-old reds he so loved.

For the next ten years the Jimmy Watson Trophy – now a household word amongst wine drinkers – remained unknown to wine consumers and of only minor interest to wine companies.

Bill Chambers judged in Melbourne from the early 1960′s. He recalls little fuss over the Watson Trophy until the Berri Co-operative’s success in 1973. Then, recalls Chambers, after an heroic celebration, winemaker Brian Barry boarded the plane carrying the Murray River’s first major trophy.

Perhaps we can link the trophy’s rise to fame more with Wolf Blass’s hat trick. He won it in 1974, 1975 and 1976 for his 1973, 1974 and 1975 vintages of ‘Dry Red Claret’. He renamed the wine Wolf Blass Black Label and used the Jimmy as its launching pad. He even proclaimed the triple victory on the neck label of his sparkling wine at the time.

Increasingly since then, to win the trophy was to harvest a windfall. For the hype surrounding each year’s winner virtually guaranteed a wine’s commercial success.

While no amount of hosing down seemed to quell trade or public clamouring for the winner, the fact remained that for most of the trophy’s history, the winning wine had not been the finished product.

This became the source of sustained and intense criticism, principally from those concerned with the integrity of show results. Awarding medals and trophies to unfinished wine simply magnified the chance of fraud, critics claimed.

Even the most meticulously honest winery blending a “representative” show sample across a range of barrels couldn’t say with certainty that what the judges tasted and what went into bottle were exactly the same.

The recent, welcome changes make this history and favour the continuing success of the fruity, easy drinking styles that’ve won in recent years. These are a long way from the wines that Jimmy Watson hand bottled in Carlton half a century ago.

While we won’t see inky, deep, raw wines like a one-year-old Penfolds Grange or Wolf Blass Black Label win the trophy again (as they have in the past), we can at last be assured that the Jimmy Watson winner we buy is the same wine the wine judges liked.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2011 First published 9 November 2011 in The Canberra Times