Sometimes a vineyard’s fate depends on succession, or lack of it – a story well illustrated by Canberra’s first two vineyards.

In 1971 CSIRO scientists Dr Edgar Riek and Dr John Kirk, unknown to each other at the time, planted vineyards on the western foreshore of Lake George and at Murrumbateman respectively.

Kirk’s Clonakilla passed smoothly from John to his son Tim and today enjoys a global clientele.

Riek’s succession, though, didn’t run as smoothly as he’d hoped after selling Lake George Vineyard in 1998. But late last year the owners, Theo Karelas and his son Sam, decided to get the vineyard and winemaking back into shape.

Sam says that even though he made the Lake George wines in recent years, he had no background in winemaking. As well, working in the family’s Four Olives Deli Café at Manly, Sydney, left little time for the vineyard.

It needed full-time care. And their determination to give it that coincided with Hardy’s plan to exit Canberra. This, in turn, caused Hardy’s Canberra winemaker, Alex McKay, to consider his options for the future.

With enormous respect for Alex’s talent and fearful that he might leave Canberra, Edgar Riek approached the Karelas family. They seized the opportunity. And after discussions with the family early this year Alex agreed to make the Lake George wines and oversee a rejuvenation of the vineyard.

The arrangement with Theo and Sam Karelas allows McKay time to develop his own brand as well. (While that’s a story for another day, we can look forward to the release of Alex’s two gold-medal winning Canberra shirazes in August).

Out at the vineyard on a freezing Sunday, Alex is clearly impressed by the site that Riek chose back in 1971. He says the soil is great – ‘it’s friable, it’s well drained and it has the right pH balance’.

The site also has a unique aspect, exposing it to humid sea breezes. This, believes Alex, means less moisture stress for vines – and that’s particularly important in our otherwise dry climate.

He points to a building to the south, beyond the adjoining Madew vineyard. Throughout the drought, it seems, the water tanks there remained two-thirds full purely from condensation run off, courtesy of the sea breezes.

Despite the sea breezes, though, the six-hectare vineyard suffered in the long drought.  Alex appears confident, though, of restoring the vineyard – and shows a twenty-year-old photograph of Edgar Riek standing in front of neatly hedged vines with trimmed swards of green grass between the rows.

Alex intends to ‘nurse the vines along gently’ and not use too many sprays. He started the rejuvenation with soil tests across the property and from this developed a range of composts that have since been spread among the vines, along with supplements to address mineral deficiencies.

Like all accomplished winemakers, Alex knows that he can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ear – or a top-notch shiraz from second grade fruit.  So the whole 6-hectare vineyard’s being reworked to produce the best possible quality.

The focus is going to be on the red varieties shiraz, pinot noir and tempranillo and on the white chardonnay and pinot gris. But a few patches of old cabernet sauvignon, malbec and viognier are to remain to make one-off small parcels or perhaps, in the case of viognier, to find its way into blends with shiraz.

The rejuvenation program includes grafting from one variety to another; grafting to better clones of the same variety; grubbing out old vines and replanting with better-suited varieties; and progressively re-trellising right across the vineyard.

Eighty-seven-year-old Edgar Riek began grafting shiraz onto pinot noir about a year ago; a block of merlot and cabernet is to be grafted over to tempranillo and shiraz this winter; and parts of the chardonnay and remaining pinot noir blocks are to be progressively grafted to better clones.

A block of shiraz at the lowest point of the vineyard is to be grubbed out and replanted to the white pinot gris – the lower, cooler location being better suited to whites.

The only new planting is to be seven rows of tempranillo on a plum site mid-vineyard that’s already been ripped in preparation.

Alex says that the gradual transformation from T-trellising to single-wire vertical shoot positioning will be accompanied by cane pruning. Together these will provide a more manageable canopy and help to optimise yields – key elements in producing high-quality fruit.

As Alex leads the charge in the vineyard – with help from Edgar Riek and Nick O’Leary, another of the young talents from Kamberra – Sam is planning the cellar door facility.

Like neighbouring Lerida Estate and Madew, he wants a substantial offering to attract both Canberra residents and travellers from the busy Federal Highway.

He envisages a large facility with both indoor and outdoor dining capacity – perhaps an outdoor pizza oven and, almost certainly, with a focus on cheese from boutique makers, both local and foreign – something that’s been a great success for him in the Manly deli.

Although Lake George has few wines to offer at present – the 2007 vintage being the hottest on record and one of the most difficult – it’s on track to deliver the vineyard’s full potential in coming years.

It seems that Edgar Riek’s vision might come true after all – thanks to the resources, will and entrepreneurial skill of the Karelas family and the outstanding talent they’ve recruited to deliver the goods.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

Coonawarra is, of course, Australia’s most-famous patch of cabernet growing dirt and a recent Chateau Shanahan tasting, though far from definitive, gave the region a healthy score card. But it wasn’t thumbs up for all of the wines tasted and, as well, several otherwise appealing drops suffered from over-oaking — a scourge that won’t quite die in Australia.

But before we look at the wines, let’s look at the region. Coonawarra lies about 400 kilometres south of Adelaide on what is now called the Limestone Coast – for good reason – though most South Australians still know it as the ‘south east’.

They’re lucky to have the Limestone Coast in South Australia at all. It could well be Victoria’s ‘far west’, as a glance at the map (or Google earth) shows.

This fertile strip of land is physically separated from South Australia as it lies entirely south of the Murray (if we include Lake Alexandrina as part of the Murray) and is separated from Victoria by nothing more than a line drawn on the map – the western boundary being the sea.

Coonawarra can only be understood in the context of this vast and comparatively recent limestone formation – Coonawarra, for example, having been above the sea for only about seven hundred thousand years.

A series of fossilised sand dunes between Coonawarra and the coast mark former shorelines as the sea retreated in glacial periods and advanced as the climate warmed. But as the land continued to rise, the shorelines shifted steadily to the west.

It seems that what we know as Coonawarra today was once an inter-dunal lagoon, perhaps similar to today’s Coorong, just an hour’s drive northwest.

These recent marine origins explain the presence of limestone beneath the generally shallow topsoils of the region. And these topsoils appear to be derived largely from that limestone bedrock.

Driving through Coonawarra you might say that it’s flat and featureless. But with the water table so close to the surface, variations of only a few metres in elevation make significant differences to land usage – especially to suitability for grape growing.

This would have been quickly apparent to Coonawarra’s early settlers before today’s drainage canals had been excavated or large-scale irrigation had affected the water table.

When John Riddoch established the Coonawarra Fruit Colony in the late nineteenth century – and this was the forerunner of the wine industry – the lower lying parts would’ve been inundated in winter and the main north-south road, around which today’s vineyards are concentrated, almost certainly marked the highest, driest tract of land.

Long before Europeans carved the road, this perennial elevated strip of land would’ve been dry and exposed to the air far more than the seasonally inundated land around it.

Over time this exposure led to the oxidation of the iron content from black ferric oxide to red ferrous oxide – giving Coonawarra’s central strip it’s famous russet colour, known as terra rossa – quite literally ‘red earth’. The surrounding soils remained black and are still subject to flooding.

The early fruit growers discovered that the comparatively well-drained red soils proved more productive than the black soils. As winemaking became the mainstay towards the latter half of the twentieth century, these red soils remained the favoured sites for grape growing, too.

Then, in the early nineties, Australia negotiated a treaty with Europe in which we recognised each other’s wine regions. The problem for Australia was that we had no formal boundaries that could be recognised.

From this grew our Geographic Indications (GI) system under which we defined and recognised in law our wine zones and regions. Thus, the Coonawarra Region became one of several regions within the Limestone Coast Zone.

The at times bitter wrangling over what was and wasn’t in Coonawarra led to the declaration of an area far larger than the popular notion of Coonawarra’s long red strip of terra rossa.

The original twenty-kilometre long cigar-shaped strip might now constitute perhaps five per cent of the declared area.

Admittedly, only a small portion of that is planted to vines. But modern Coonawarra unquestionably has unproven broad acres of land well beyond the original strip. Some of this may prove to be outstanding. But much of it may also be quite ordinary – especially if an end to the long dry floods some of the new plantings.

The recent tasting at Chateau Shanahan is just one of several planned for the next few months – including a look a the much-hyped 1998s – in an attempt to see who and what’s in form in Coonawarra.

We’ll be following this up with a field trip next January to see what’s really happening on the ground and which wines are really worthy of carrying the Coonawarra name.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan