On single-variety wines.

Iwo Jakimowicz, Si Vintners, Margaret River, WA

SINGLE-VARIETY, single-site wines make a clear point. In the winery, we handle each of our wines in basically the same way – it’s a similar oak treatment, and we only use native yeasts – so it’s really about what we’re doing in the vineyard. We’re running everything biodynamically, too, so it’s about understanding our sites and making each shine on its own. It’s not a groundbreaking approach – it’s what producers have been doing in Europe for thousands of years. I guess we’re just trying to emulate that on a small scale here in Margaret River.

You need to be a bit more precise when it comes to making singlevariety wines. You can’t go, ‘Oh well, I’ll blend back some of this wine into that other one’. It’s an accurate representation of the fruit and the year. We don’t use any additives either, so we can’t top up the acid or tannin in a wine. It’s about purity, fine-tuning things and getting it right, as you’ve only got one crack at it.

We farm about 12 hectares, and more than 50 per cent of that is chardonnay. We decided that chardonnay is what works best from our region and site. Over the past couple of years and into the future, we’re going to be making three chardonnays from three separate sites, all within 10 kilometres of each other but with particular soil types, to highlight the differences.

Blending is a great option to have up your sleeve, but it’s not our focus. It’s variety-dependant as well. Cabernet is a good one to blend, with merlot being one of its classic partners. But chardonnay is our focus, and we think it works better as a single-varietal wine. Single-variety wines are essential to the Australian wine landscape so we can start seeing the differences between regions and sites. To use France as an example, I love that if you go to Burgundy, you know you’re either going to get chardonnay or pinot noir and that it will be the best of what the region has to offer. I think we’re getting to that point now. Margaret River has been producing wine for 50-odd years, and we know that the south is working well with chardonnay, whereas Wilyabrup is working great with cabernet. Figuring out those sorts of things is a sign of regions maturing, and it allows the rest of the world to recognise our strengths and styles.

Single-variety wines are essential to the Australian wine landscape so that we can start seeing the differences between regions and sites.

STANDOUT SINGLE-VARIETY: Our home block, the Halcyon Vineyard, is a 40-year-old site, so we’ve got a soft spot for the chardonnay we make from there. It’s required a lot of effort because we haven’t owned it since day one and converting it to organics over the past 10 years has been a challenge. But it’s in a good spot now, and we’re proud of that wine.