Eileen Hardy Shiraz – flagship red of the Hardy Wine Company was introduced in 1973 to celebrate the 80th birthday of family matriarch, Eileen Hardy. That wine, a selection of the best McLaren Vale Shiraz from the 1970 vintage, still drinks well today.

What began as a birthday gift became a company flagship, despite significant style and quality changes across the years. As we saw last week, modern Eileen now brings together all that’s been learned in vineyard and winery in the 35 years since that first vintage.

Individual vineyard plots – mostly in McLaren Vale but including components from Clare, Padthaway and Frankland River — contribute small batches of varying style. These are all fermented separately and matured in French oak barrels separately until chief red-wine maker Paul Lapsley and his boss, Peter Dawson, assemble the final blend.

The current release 2001, for example, comes 88 per cent from McLaren Vale and 9 per cent from Frankland River with a splash from other regions – all matured in a variety of high quality French oak barrels.

It weighs in at a comparatively modest 13.6 per cent alcohol (some of our gun reds hit 14.5 or more) and is clearly a wine to cellar. The colour’s deep but not opaque and the aroma and flavour are built on bright, intense varietal character with a delicious savouriness. The structure is firm, tight and satisfying – a wine to reveal more as it ages for a decade or two.

From past tasting and a fresh look at the 1970 then the nineties vintages last week, I’d say the very early Eileens were wonderful and the eighties vintages lacklustre. During the nineties the style strengthened, especially towards the end of the decade. But in the new century Eileen appears to be settling into a consistent, fine, savoury style – epitomised to me by the glorious but not yet released 2002 vintage. This is jaw-dropping stuff.

The white flagship, Eileen Hardy Chardonnay is a jaw dropper, too. Made by chief white-wine maker, Tom Newton – with support from Peter Dawson – this is blazing new trails.

It’s a wine without boundaries. Newton and Dawson’s search for the best material began in 1986 in Padthaway – the company’s largest chardonnay resource – and widened over time to include Canberra, the Yarra Valley, Adelaide Hills and Tasmania.

Says Dawson, “we look for a good expression of chardonnay with intensity and the inherent structure to support oak fermentation, malolactic fermentation and oak maturation”.

What this means is that if you use the right grapes, a string of potentially intrusive winemaking practices are subsumed by the intense fruit flavour. The result is a beautiful, complex, dry, firmly structured wine capable of extended bottle ageing.

That the ‘right’ fruit is now sourced predominantly from Tasmania was partly an accident. A search for intensely flavoured, delicate chardonnay and pinot noir for sparkling wine, while successful, also revealed promising parcels of table wine material.

The first Tasmanian material was included in Eileen in 1999. So good was it, that in 2000, a particularly warm vintage in many cool regions, the proportion of Tasmanian fruit in the blend shot up to sixty five per cent – the remainder coming from the high, cool Hoddles Creek vineyard in the Yarra Valley.

Subsequent vintages retain a core of Tasmanian material combined with fruit from the Yarra Valley, Tumbarumba and the Adelaide Hills.

The current release 2002 is as good as Australian chardonnays gets.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2005 & 2007

This is the story of three jaw-dropping wines – a $90 shiraz, a $13 shiraz and a $40 chardonnay.

The first has been 35 years in the making and the second, 19 years. The third, with only a few vintages in bottle, might be just a shadow of itself without the 35-year endeavour behind the $90 bottle.

The $90 and $40 wines are Eileen Hardy Shiraz and Eileen Hardy Chardonnay, respectively – flagships for the Hardy Wine Company, a division of US based Constellation brands.

Both wines give the lie to the notion – put about by French makers and some critics — that big Aussie companies make nothing but oceans of bland soul-less wine. What rubbish.

The Eileens are superb, small production wines built on a deep and growing intimacy with numerous small vineyard plots.

At a tasting this week, Hardy red-wine maker, Paul Lapsley, explained that in May, after red-wine classifications, the team reviewed the performance of wines from each vineyard and sub-plots within vineyards and from there determined a pruning regime and target yields.

Vineyards likely to produce fruit good enough for Eileen Hardy shiraz had, over the last five years, been converted from mechanical pruning to hand pruning. While expensive, it means individual care of every vine and a higher success rate in creating properly ripe berries – the very core of a wine of this calibre.

Correct pruning is only part of the picture. Lapsley says that it’s important to keep the vines free of excess stress and to avoid overcropping. To achieve this, the Eileen vineyards are mulched to retain ground water while shoot thinning and the removal of unripe fruit help maintain a crop load in balance with the foliage.

If all goes well this produces berries that ripen at modest sugar levels (too much sugar equals too much alcohol in the finished wine) and produce wines with vibrant fruit, not the ‘thick stewiness of over-ripe fruit’.

Typically, says Lapsley,  “the vineyards that produce this quality are 30 to 100 years old. Old vines produce wines that have a sweetness and creaminess on the mid palate – a silkiness”.

The perfect Eileen Hardy Shiraz grape, Paul reckons, weighs about one gram, displays vibrant fruit ripeness and has ripe tannins in the skins and seeds. That’s how finicky this flagship wine business is – aiming to get every berry just right.

Having harvest the right fruit Lapsley’s aim in the winery is to “express that fruit”, to build a savoury element, and to extract the tannins that give structure without harshness.

Each batch is gently crushed to include whole berries and fermented in small open fermenters with the skins floating as a cap on top. The open fermenters mean some desirable alcohol evaporation, with finished wines 1 to 1.5 per cent lower in alcohol than wines from closed vessels.

And the floating cap (as opposed to submerged using boards), according to Paul, allows some oxygen exposure, greater permeability for pumping the juice over and better temperature control.

From the fermenter each batch goes to compatible oak barrels. And the diversity of small parcels used in Eileen means an equal diversity of new used French oak barrels from various top coopers.

And remember, at this stage Eileen is still a collection of unique small batches. The blend comes much later as we’ll see next week.

Hardys Eileen Hardy Chardonnay 2002 $35 to $45
A vertical tasting of Eileen Hardy Chardonnays from the first vintage, 1986, to the unreleased 2004 (see main story) confirmed in my mind that Eileen sits at the top of the pack in Australia. To my palate it hit the pace in 2000 and, since then, it’s made little advances with the 2002 and 2004 being as good as it gets in Australia. And that makes it a bargain given the $100 plus price tags of some of its competitors. Good bottles of 2002 I’d rate as probably the best Aussie chardonnay yet tasted. However, the 2004 gives it a close run and will ultimately be the better buy as it comes screw cap sealed and should not suffer the bottle variation seen under earlier cork-sealed vintages.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2005 & 2007

As reported last week, David Farmer, co-founder of former Canberra-based Farmer Bros, is about to re-enter the wine trade via a cellar door mail order operation –glug.com.au — in the Barossa Valley.

While setting up the business, though, David’s been applying the disciplines of his old trade, geology, to the Barossa. This work when published could reshape the Barossa marketing landscape.

An exploration geologist before turning to the wine trade in 1975, Farmer’s been sleuthing the Barossa landscape for several years now, seeking to understand what created the various land surfaces and pondering the style of wine that each of these might create.

While this may seem an academic activity, an intimate knowledge of land surface and its relationship to wine styles in the long term lies at the heart of France’s wine appellation system.

Farmer’s not arguing for a similar naming system here. But he believes that an understanding of the landscape could contribute to a better understanding of wine styles. And, linked with that, comes better, more informative marketing of wine from a particular site.

Marketing wines from individual vineyards or groups of vineyards isn’t new. It evolves in virtually every wine region as winemakers recognise the individuality of wine from particular sites.

In an area as old, complex and intensively planted as the Barossa, the practice is well established and growing rapidly as winemakers compete for grapes from the best vineyard plots and then vinify even quite small batches individually.

From his work Farmer expects to define about fifteen distinct grape-growing sub-regions within the Barossa, based on his observations of the land surface, what lies immediately beneath it and what formed it.

Winemakers with long-term experience sourcing grapes throughout the valley understand site-related flavour variation. But the names given to the sites tend to be generalised and based on points of the compass or local place names.

As the practice of releasing these wines separately grows, the use of Farmer’s definitions in conjunction with the old site names could add dramatically to the marketing message – especially were the sites to be viewed on the three-dimensional maps now under construction.

In the future, instead of hearing of northern, southern, eastern or western Barossa, or of Kalimna, Moppa, Lyndoch or Stockwell, we’ll hear, as well, of the southern angular-rock type soils, the cobbled soils of Roland Flat, the Kalimna dunes and the Gomersal Ridge sands.

And through Farmer’s 3-D map, we’ll be able to see each of these and more in the context of the Valley as a whole: starting south at the separate Lyndoch Valley with its slopes, flats and feeder valleys; then north over the ridge into the southern Barossa proper with its rolling, North-Para-River-eroded landscape; over the Gomersal plateau with black, cracking soils, inhospitable to vines, and its magic, sandy western ridge; through to the rising and flatter central and northern valley to the Kalimna sand dunes; east to the rim of the recently uplifted ranges (the Eden Valley) and across to the lower,  more eroded western rim, including the Marananga and Seppeltsfield bowls.

Throughout this infinitely varied landscape, winemakers are defining the sub-regions by the wines they make. What Farmer is doing, with a touch of genius, is creating a future marketing platform for an emerging generation of highly individual sub-regional wines. The publication date has yet to be announced. Check Farmer’s website, www.glug.com.au for updates.
Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2005 & 2007

If you’re wondering where David Farmer went, I’ve found him in the Barossa. I found his brother Richard there, too. They’re about to re-enter the wine trade.

For those who don’t remember the Farmers, this is the pair that back in 1975 took advantage of Whitlam’s Trade Practices Act and liberalised ACT liquor licensing laws to smash retail price maintenance in the Territory and beyond.

They established Farmer Bros at Manuka in June of that year and by the end of 1976 had a thriving Australia-wide mail order wine business, operating out of a warehouse/store in Mort Street, Braddon.

In 1985, by now with a large store in Sydney’s Waterloo as well, the brothers split — in the acrimonious way to which family partnerships seem prone. David and a group of partners, myself included, bought Richard’s half of the business. Richard promptly set up in opposition. And the original Farmer Bros, now under David’s control, expanded rapidly, quadrupling its turnover, expanding to Melbourne and buying a hotel in Tasmania.

Following the demise of his business, Richard moved out the industry. Farmer Bros survived a little longer. But in late 1994 after a near merger with Cellarmaster Wines – the large and then privately owned wine club operator — the receivers walked in.

The business’s major asset, its mailing list, was sold to Cellarmasters. As a result ‘Farmer Bros Direct’ continues to exist, though Cellarmasters now belongs to Fosters. Coles Myer’s Liquorland Group bought the Farmer Bros stores in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

David Farmer worked with Cellarmaster for a short period before joining Theo Karedis, owner of Sydney-based Theo’s liquor store chain. With Theo, David established David Farmers warehouse style outlet at Philip and produced those highly distinctive, informative tabloid catalogues that used to fall out of the Canberra Times.

When Theo sold his chain — including the David Farmer outlet — to Coles Myer about two years ago, David continued to produce the David Farmer, Theo’s and Crown of the Hill catalogues for the Sydney and Canberra markets – an arrangement that continued until June this year.

By this time Coles Myer had re-branded the David Farmer store twice – firstly as Theo’s and now as First Choice, a brand created to take on Woolworths Dan Murphy chain.

Meanwhile, the ever inventive David had slipped off to the Barossa and established glug.com.au, an idiosyncratic website built around wine but including an eclectic mix of politics, election polls, food, book reviews, industry news and analysis, much of the latter provided by brother Richard.

While David provides a marketing consultancy to several wineries in the Barossa, he’d established Glug as an entrée back into wine retailing. This time, however, his comeback will be as vigneron – he already has the license – by tapping into small parcels of fruit from high-quality Barossa vineyards and having these made into wine by leading local producers.

The first of these are to be released at the National Press Club in November. I’ll cover these in a later article. But the topic of interest for next week will be a look at David’s perspective of the Barossa’s surprisingly diverse viticultural landscape.

A geologist before turning to the wine trade, Farmer’s been sleuthing the Barossa landscape for several years now, seeking to understand what created the various land surfaces and pondering the diversity of wine styles that each of these might create.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2005 & 2007