TOP DROPS
Victoria’s High Country has become one of the most dynamic winemaking regions in Australia. MICHAEL HARDEN heads north for a lesson in unusual drops.
Michael Harden takes a tour through one of the most dynamic winemaking regions in Australia.
Fashion is rarely a plus when it comes to wine-making but right now it’s serving Victoria’s High Country well. Wine has been produced in this beautiful, fertile region of mountains, valleys and river flats in the state’s north-east for more than 150 years but the nature of the winemaking – mostly smaller-scale, family-owned enterprises best known for fortified wine – meant the region has often been slightly off-radar for all but dedicated wine geeks.
But now that small-scale, owner-operated and artisan are buzzwords at the height of vinous fashion, the region from Rutherglen to King Valley to Beechworth is garnering almost as much attention for its wine as it does for its snowfields and flashy autumn leaves. And deservedly so.
Over the last decade or so, a new generation of winemakers has been pushing the boundaries and challenging the stereotypes of what the High Country is capable of producing, pioneering Italian varieties and finding new ways of working with old school grapes like durif. It has become one of the most dynamic, original and interesting wine-making regions in the country.
“The beauty of the North-East is that there are so many small wine regions that are special for their own reasons, their unique differentiations,” says Raquel Jones, the winemaker at Weathercraft Wine in Beechworth and recently inducted Young Gun of Wine. “The variable climate and soil mean that there’s so much scope for people to try new things.”
Raquel and her husband Hugh bought their vineyard and winery in 2016 and are a good example of the new High Country attitude. Small scale and hands-on, they have added tempranillo and albarino to their vineyard’s original plantings of shiraz grapes and proudly wave the flag for the diversity of varieties in the region.
They’ve also signed on to a new initiative of immersive wine experiences being launched across the region. The programme involves small group, bookings-only tours that provide unique deep-dives into local winemaking through thoughtful, bespoke experiences with winemakers, matched with food made from the amazingly diverse and versatile local produce. It’s all about the sensory – smelling the ferments, tasting the grapes, touching the soil.
At Weathercraft, small groups are collected from their accommodation, taken into the vineyard and the winery by Raquel or Hugh to participate in barrel tastings before returning to the tiny, light-filled cellar door that overlooks the main vineyard to taste flights of tempranillo served alongside plates of tapas, also made by Raquel.
The experiences vary as much as the region’s micro climates and sub-regions and can be calibrated from novice to buff.
At Jones winery, for example, lunch at owner and winemaker Mandy Jones’ French-accented restaurant can be followed by a dessert-based tasting experience led by Mandy in the cellar door. Based around muscat, it can include everything from a muscat spritz to matching classic muscat with a choc-orange parfait.
It’s an exciting time to be in the High Country. Here are some of the experiences that are making it even more so.
A new generation of winemakers has been pushing boundaries and challenging stereotypes of what the High Country is capable of producing.
The King Valley Sangiovese Tour Chrismont & Pizzini Wines
The ridiculously gorgeous King Valley, all quiet country roads, big skies, fertile farmland and distant mountains, pioneered prosecco in Australia in the 1990s and is now pushing sangiovese as its next big Italian thing.
The Sangiovese Tour takes in the lab at Chrismont winery, the nerve centre of the King Valley’s Sangiovese Project, a collaborative effort with the regions’ growers aimed at maximising the quality of the valley’s fruit and wine. Winemaker Warren Proft explains the science behind the project (complete with test tubes and bubbling vats) before hosting lunch with matching sangiovese on the veranda at the Chrismont restaurant and cellar door. The magnificent views across the vines to the Black Ranges and a menu of Italian classics, such as eggplant polpette and superb carpaccio, can make tree-changing here seem like a viable and sensible plan.
After lunch, you’re dropped at Pizzini to meet up with Joel Pizzini for a guided tour of his sangiovese plantings. Joel, a second-generation winemaker, gets you up close and personal with the vines that grew the grapes you’ll drinking later, both straight from the barrel in the winery and in the more luxurious surrounds of Pizzini’s private tasting room, an elegantly cosy space in a renovated tobacco drying kiln.
“You get a better sense of place when you can visit the sites where the actual grapes come from,” says Joel. “If you can taste the grapes from the vine and smell the air and feel the soil, it helps fill in part of the story.” chrismont.com.au; pizzini.com.au
True Muscat Experience Pfeiffer Wines
This is one for those who fancy some blending action in atmospheric surrounds. Held in Pfeiffer Winery’s century-old barrel room, guests are seated at a lamp-lit dining table and are guided through the process of blending their own muscat, including syphoning muscat straight from the barrel with a ‘wine thief’. It’ll usually be one of the Pfeiffer clan taking you through your blending paces so you’ll get a heap of family history alongside the skinny on blending the four muscat classifications you’re given to work with. Those hulking barrels surrounding you? They’re more than 100 years old and originally came from Germany. The muscat you’re working with? Part of the 3000 barrels of the stuff of which the Pfeiffer family consider themselves custodians rather than owners. Besides the stories, you also get to take a small bottle of your own blend with you to impress your friends. The region makes some of the best muscat in the world, so there’s something quite wonderful, even humbling, about an experience like this that brings you in such close quarters to that legacy. pfeifferwinesrutherglen.com.au
All Saints Luxury Immersion All Saints Winery
Indulgent good times for happy couples, the All
Saints experience starts with the accommodation – a luxuriously renovated, three-level French Provincialstyle tower on the old Mount Ophir Estate outside of Rutherglen. The level of luxury in the tower – breakfast and wine laid on, supremely comfortable bed, great reading material and Netflix – may have you considering staying safely ensconced in your Rapunzel tower. But then the chauffeur-driven 1973 convertible Rolls Royce turns up. It’s there to whisk you off for a three-course lunch at The Terrace Restaurant, where chef Simon Arkless takes advantage of estate-grown produce and does wonderful things with beef and duck. Lunch is followed by a tour around some of the other wineries in the neighbourhood before dinner at Thousand Pound, the Brown family’s bar on Rutherglen’s main street. The next day, it’s another Rolls Royce journey back to All Saints to meet up with family winemaker Nick Brown for a day of hands-on winemaking that includes blending and bottling your own wine. Immersion indeed. allsaintswine.com.au
Durif Redesigned Scion Winery
Scion owner and winemaker Rowly Milhinch leads this journey into one of the flagship wines of the Rutherglen region, durif. But this is durif reimagined by Milhinch, who likes to march to the beat of his own barrel. He makes and presents durif in surprising forms, from a beautiful dry and savoury rosé and the medium-bodied “smashable” Fortrose to the amazing After Dark, a restrained, fortified durif designed for grown-ups. For Milhinch, it’s all about highlighting the nuances of place and seasonality, to surprise and delight with how many different expressions can come from the same grape depending on where it’s planted and when it’s picked. The tasting is accompanied by a series of snacks designed by Michael Ryan, chef and owner of Beechworth’s renowned Provenance restaurant. scionvineyard.com
Cento Passi Dal Zotto
Otto Dal Zotto planted the first prosecco vines in Australia and the fact that the King Valley is now Australia’s prosecco central shows that he made a pretty good fist of it. So there’s no shortage of prosecco on Dal Zotto’s Cento Passi (100 Steps) tour but it’s just one part of the story the family want to tell. The tour starts with Otto’s son Michael explaining the family’s love and feel for prosecco and then moves to the Dal Zotto veggie patch, a short stroll from the cellar door, where Otto’s wife Elena tends an incredible array of produce, from raspberries to pumpkins. Whatever’s ripe for the picking is plucked from the garden and taken to the Dal Zotto kitchen where chef Nikki Kennedy awaits. Lunch, including dishes like sage leaves picked from the garden, stuffed with anchovies and capers and then fried in prosecco batter, is eaten overlooking the vineyard, completing the Dal Zotto family story, and all within 100 steps. “Obviously wine is part of the experience,” says Otto’s son Christian. “But it’s just one part it. On this tour we want to introduce select groups of people to the things we’re passionate about. Food, wine, family, produce – these are the things that makes us who we are and what we are. It’s showing who we are as a family.” dalzotto.com.au Old World v New World: Spotlight on Sangiovese James & Co. Husband and wife team Ricky and Georgie James opened their cellar door on Rutherglen’s Main Street in 2017. It’s a charming space, spacious and light-filled. Ricky is a winemaker who specialises in sangiovese made from grapes mostly sourced from around Beechworth. For this experience, Ricky likes to put his wines next to traditional European varieties. In his charming and informative hands, the comparison is not a competition but a journey where you start to realise just how versatile the sangiovese grape is as it sits alongside a Provencal rosé or a Tuscan Brunello. It’s about context and about region. jamesandcowines.com.au