LUKE LAMBERT ON HIS NEBBIOLO

Luke Lambert makes a range of wines, but his muse is nebbiolo. He drinks it, makes it and has worked several vintages in Piedmont’s Barolo – the variety’s spiritual home. “While Barolo is the benchmark and got me into the variety, I would never want my wine to taste like it,” Luke says. “I’m still trying to figure it out here. I just want it to be good, to look like that variety, the vintage and vineyard.”

Luke has always bought fruit for his eponymous label, having never owned a vineyard, but that’s about to change. He recently acquired 14.5 hectares of land on the outskirts of the Yarra Valley, but only 2.4 hectares will be planted to nebbiolo. “It’s exciting and scary. I have confidence it’s going to work – it’s a beautiful amphitheatre – but I won’t know what that really means for another 20 years.” Stylistically, he is unwavering: nebbiolo must age in old oak foudres. Ideally, he would like to hold his releases back for extra bottle age, adding that his current 2016 looked “terrible” at first. “I didn’t like the vintage at all, but I’m coming around to it now. It has only just shed its puppy fat in the last year. It has changed a lot in a few months,” he says. Nebbiolo is like that. He also now opts for a shorter maceration time of 15 to 20 days. “It’s not Barolo, where the longer you leave it the more tannins you get. It doesn’t work that way here. I’ve found the more lees while on skins drags the tannin after 40 days and the wine ends up covered by a doughiness. I don’t like that because it feels round, and nebbiolo should have the texture of acidulated, dry water. I’ve learnt my lessons by making mistakes and doing lots of trials.”

Since 2015, Luke has also made the wines for Denton, where he sources his nebbiolo.

One of the most rewarding of these wines is the 2015 Denton Yellow, an oxidative style of chardonnay. Apparently two misplaced barrels were rediscovered with a layer of flor, or yeast, developing to protect the wine. One barrel was bottled in 2017 and it is a dry, delicious, super-savoury wine with salty-lemon notes reminiscent of Jura vin jaune. The second barrel will be bottled later this year, after spending four years under flor.

“I didn’t like the 2016 vintage at all, but I’m coming around to it now. It has only just shed its puppy fat in

the last year.”