Tag Archives: Adelaide Hills

Dream Weaver

Geoff Weaver is a man of conviction. You’d have to be to ask one of Australia’s most famous winemakers for a job before you’d so much as crushed your first grape. Or to borrow, in the early ‘80s,  $100,000 at 20% interest to sink into a vineyard in a region with no vines. Or to get out and hand-plant it in your spare moments away from your full-time gig, which just happens to be making a sizeable chunk of all Australia’s wine. But Geoff – sportsman, farmer, artist – has faith in the ideal that honest toil yields eventual rewards.
That belief has been endorsed by the news that Geoff’s Sauvignon Blanc is Australia’s best, as judged by the nation’s foremost wine authority. His 2014 Ferus took out the trophy at the recent James Halliday Wine Companion Awards. He’s picked up more than his fair share of accolades in his 40-year winemaking career but that doesn’t stop Geoff greeting the latest with characteristic humility. “I’m really delighted that James has picked out our more subtle, understated styles,” he says. “I’ve always felt that as a small winemaker, you can’t be all things to all people, and you’ve got to stand for something. We do what we do; we’re not trying to match popular trends, we’re just trying to do the best thing that we can do.”
Such is his affection for the Lenswood site where the wine was grown, that it’s hard to imagine Geoff anywhere else. But there was nothing inevitable about the cricket- and footy-crazed kid’s journey into wine and the Adelaide Hills. The first seed was sown at school where he discovered an affinity for botany and geology, and struck up a fateful, lifelong friendship with Brian Croser. The two of them went on to study agricultural science together, but Geoff finished the course with no clear idea what to do next. His curiosity was piqued on visits to McLaren Vale to see his buddy Croser, who’d landed a job at Hardys. His football coach also worked in wine and helped Geoff pen speculative job applications to luminaries such a Karl Seppelt, Colin Gramp and Max Schubert. He recalls a spur-of-the-moment decision to take a post-footy drive to the home of Penfolds. “It was 5 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and I just parked and got out and was having a look around when this guy walked out the main door. I thought I’d better come clean, so I went over and said g’day and we just got talking and I said, ‘As a matter of fact I’ve just written to your company about a job’.” It turns out it was Schubert himself who’d walked out the door, and he offered Geoff a job there and then. “I was this kid with stars in his eyes driving down the main drive at Magill thinking, ‘I’ve got a job in the wine business!’”
Geoff with Ferus
He ended up turning down the creator of Grange to take a job with Orlando (now Pernod Ricard Winemakers), who offered to pay him $30 a week and send him to Roseworthy Agricultural College to get his winemaking qualification. For a kid with no money and a beat-up, windscreenless Vauxhall Viva, the offer was too good to pass up.
He learned a great deal under the tutelage of Mark Tummel and Gunther Prass but was persuaded to join Croser at Hardys in 1975, only for his mate to move on within months. “I thought, ‘Shit. I’m a young kid and I really don’t know my way around but I’m in charge of 3% of Australia’s wines here’,” he says. Geoff being Geoff, he dealt with it. Initially in charge of the Hardys whites, taking in brands such as Siegersdorf and Old Castle Riesling, he worked his way up to the position of chief winemaker in 1987.
That, though, was five years after he’d passed a more cherished milestone. He and his winemaking pals had long been pooling their pennies to taste the world’s classic wines, delving into their detail, striving to unlock the DNA of their greatness. Australian whites, in particular, looked clumsy, alcoholic and short on aromatic finesse in comparison. Geoff became convinced that the key was a warm site in a cool region, which led him to the hitherto unplanted Adelaide Hills. Days were spent scouring the rolling landscape for the right spot, thermometer dangling out of the car window. “The deal was that we felt we could push back the frontiers of Australian winemaking. At that time we were dominated by the traditional areas of Barossa, McLaren Vale – Yarra was pretty new, Tasmania was pretty much unheard of and Margaret River was just really starting, and we felt the Adelaide Hills could do a lot.” And there it was: the rundown, 70-acre hobby farm that was his destiny. “My dream had always been to be a small winemaker and in 1982 we bought land at Lenswood. We had no money – of course you don’t have money – and the interest rates were 20%. I had two partners and we cobbled together $10,000 between us to buy a $110,000 property.”
Even then, it almost didn’t happen. The bank almost pulled the plug. Others caught wind of the winemaker sniffing round for vineyard land and threatened to buy it from under them. But Geoff, whose guileless Aussie vernacular is punctuated with surprising literary allusions, was resolute. “I’d been reading Émile Zola’s The Earth and I realised those French guys, they fight tooth and nail to do stuff, and I realised it was a life-changing moment. We were out on a limb but I knew we had to do it.”
That’s when the hard work began. Hardys was going full throttle, and weekends were given over entirely to his own patch – at the expense of his beloved footy, cricket and wife Judy, who that same year gave birth to their first child, Alexandra. With no machinery and no money to buy any, this meant begging, borrowing and burrowing away with his bare hands – as well as those of his father, Henry (pictured below), who spent thousands of hours at his side. Playing over and over in Geoff’s head, as he traipsed up and down the furrows, was an adage he’d read on a Vincent van Gogh sketch of a man pulling a harrow: “If one has no horse, one is one’s own horse”.
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Geoff and Judy’s mettle was to be tested again in the most dramatic of ways, long before a drop of wine had been made. The Ash Wednesday bushfires of February 1983 ripped through the region and destroyed all they’d done. Again, though, Geoff was sanguine. “It’s like playing footy. You get a whack, you’ve got two choices. Do you get up or do you capitulate?” he says. “Well, I thought, we’re not capitulating. We didn’t. I said, ‘It’ll be a Garden of Eden one day; it’ll be beautiful’.”
And so it has proved. “It felt really right from day one. I’ve never regretted where we’ve chosen. We’ve been very fortunate, we’ve got beautiful soils – sandy loam over bright-coloured orange/ochre clays – and enough water in the soil, but with good water and air drainage.” The roots go deep in search of moisture, to which Geoff attributes the intensity and vitality of his wines. He also sees the naturally low pH of the wines as contributing that savoury, stony character that some are moved to call minerality. He capped the plantings at 35 acres under vine, from which Geoff produces Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir plus two iterations of Sauvignon Blanc – one reared in nothing but stainless steel, and the wild-fermented, lees-stirred, old oak-aged Ferus. The dappled light and low yields of this dry-grown site produce exactly the kind of wines he’s looking for. “What I want with the Sauvignon Blanc is that juicy, zingy quality; that supple, almost sweet middle palate coupled with that gentle, dry, acid austerity – but not aggressiveness,” says Geoff. He appears to have hit the mark, with Halliday declaring him “a master of his art”.
It comes as no surprise that Geoff highlights the invaluable support of friends along the way. Chief among them are old pal Brian Croser and Martin Shaw, who’ve allowed him to compose his wines under their roofs at Petaluma, Shaw + Smith and, nowadays, Tapanappa. And all this time, he and Judy have battled away to pay down the debt. “If there’s a tortoise and hare story, we’re definitely the tortoise. We’ve just plodded along trying to make the best wines we can.”
These days Adelaide Hills is well and truly on the map for exceptional cool-climate wines. Shaw + Smith have enjoyed great success and there are those like Tim Knappstein and Stephen Henschke who, without conferring, had the same idea at roughly the same time as Geoff, the three of them ending up practically next door to one another. And then there’s the boundary-pushing new-wave producers such as Gentle Folk and Commune of Buttons.
Quick though he is to point to the prowess of others, his thoughts are often confined to what’s right in front of him. He loves to paint and ponder the joys of life and family in the solitude of his Lenswood home. “It’s just so grand to be there. It’s beautiful to be engaged in what’s essentially an agricultural, horticultural and artistic pursuit in this glorious countryside,” he says. Often at day’s end he simply sits atop the hill and takes it all in. “How blessed are we to live in this great country and to have the opportunity to do these things?” he wonders. “It’s just fantastic.”

*A version of this article appeared on the CellarHand website. CellarHand is both the author’s employer and the Victorian distributor of Geoff Weaver wines.

Pannell Beater

McLaren Vale winemaker Stephen Pannell has won the highest prize in Australian wine for his 2013 Adelaide Hills Syrah.
It’s the second time he’s taken out the prestigious Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy at the Royal Melbourne Wine Awards, which he first snagged 18 years ago with the 1995 Eileen Hardy Shiraz.
His is the first Adelaide Hills wine to win the award and breaks a seven-year drought for South Australia, which once dominated this competition to unearth Australia’s best one- to two-year-old dry red wine.

Jimmy Trophy engraved
“They’re honest, affordable wines, for people – not collectors. They’re wines that when I see them I can afford them, I buy them and I drink them.”
Stephen Pannell* is talking about the reds that inspired the 2013 Adelaide Hills Syrah, which just snagged the greatest prize in the Australian vinosphere. “Some of the most inspiring wines I’ve had came from 2010 in the Northern Rhône. I’ve been absolutely obsessed with those wines. As I was drinking them I kept thinking ‘We can make that here’.”
The wine that won Pannell his second Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy wasn’t designed to emulate the wines of Saint-Joseph and Cornas but rather to pay homage to their brilliance. “I love that duality where you have intensity, strength, depth and power on the one hand, and then you have delicacy and finesse,” he says.
Pannell uses the term “Syrah” – something some Aussies see as treacherous affectation – as a deliberate demarcation of this cool-climate style. By contrast, he also makes a McLaren Vale “Shiraz” that seeks to harness the region’s naturally sweet, rich mouthfeel and mid-palate. They’re very distinct renderings of the same variety, but the philosophy is the same. “They’re made to taste like grapes and like they come from somewhere rather than tasting of how they’re made,” Pannell says.
This has meant working the vineyard hard in able to pick earlier, elevating the role of “real grape tannins”, keeping oxygen out and trimming back on new oak. “So sweet! So gentle!” wrote Jancis Robinson of the 2011 S.C. Pannell Shiraz. “Sumptuous and beautifully balanced. Wonderfully clean and refreshing on the finish.”
But what of the wine of the moment? Fruit for Pannell’s 2013 Syrah was grown on well-drained, granitic soil in Echunga, 410 metres above sea level in the southern Adelaide Hills. The Syrah grapes, along with 2% Viognier, were picked by hand and vinified in small, open-top fermenters, with 15 to 20% whole bunches included in the ferment. It was then aged for 12 months in large format French oak vats and puncheons, a quarter of which were new.
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As one of Australia’s most respected show judges (he presides over the National Wine Show of Australia) with a palate to match, Pannell knows it takes a “huge slice of luck” to win the Jimmy Watson, but he knew the Syrah was something special from day one. “Yes, it’s lovely,” he confesses. “The 2013s have a real grapeyness about them, a presence and a freshness. In these wines the fruit looks alive. The grape doesn’t look like it was half dead before you shoved it in the bottle. I still think the 2010 Grenache was my best wine, but this Syrah is one of the top two I’ve made under this label. I suppose if I was ever going to win the Jimmy Watson, it would be with this wine.”
Pannell often jokes that he doesn’t do much to make his wines – and doesn’t know why they turn out so well. That’s mostly nonsense, of course; a combination of instinct and experience mean you couldn’t meet a more sure-footed winemaker. He was born into wine, as a member of the family that founded Moss Wood, one of Margaret River’s most exalted wineries. He’s worked vintages in Burgundy, Barolo, Bordeaux and Priorat and held domestic winemaking roles at Andrew Garrett, Seppelt and Tim Knappstein, where he was first alerted to the potential of the Adelaide Hills. That was followed by an eight-year stint at Hardys, which saw him snag that first Jimmy Watson and rise to the role of Chief Red Winemaker.
“It takes knowledge to let the wines make themselves. When I say I don’t do anything, that’s not true. Where we do more is in the vineyard. And then you’ve still got to decide when you’re going to pick, how much whole bunch to do, how much Viognier to add, when to press, when to rack, what temperature to ferment at. There’s a lot of decisions.”
He’s developed the knack of getting those decisions right – and in a sense the Jimmy Watson is a vindication of the hardest one of all: the move to strike out under his own name, launching S.C. Pannell as a “virtual winery” in 2004.
Stephen Pannell close up seated jacketed with glass, pic grant nowell
The past decade has seen its fair share of “hard days and a lot of self-examination”. But the purpose has always been clear: an honest translation of grape and place – be it the cool slopes of Adelaide Hills or the warm, Mediterranean climate of Pannell’s McLaren Vale home. He’s one those surprisingly rare winemakers that talks like a winelover, drinks widely and avidly enjoys his own wine. Those traits have helped him chase styles that suit the way Australians live and the food we eat.
As well as an enduring love of McLaren Vale staples Grenache and Shiraz, this has stretched to an affection for Nebbiolo in the Adelaide Hills and Tempranillo and Touriga Nacional from the Fleurieu Peninsula. His faith has paid off, with the 2012 Tempranillo Touriga winning Best Red Blend at last year’s Royal Melbourne Wine Awards. “Touriga’s always really interesting,” says Pannell. “For me it’s probably the third most important variety in McLaren Vale after Shiraz and Grenache.”
The Jimmy Watson win tops off a dream run for Pannell and wife Fiona, who followed up the purchase of a long-coveted vineyard with the acquisition in June of a new cellar door and winery in the heart of their beloved McLaren Vale. “I’m trying to contain the excitement,” says Pannell. “You’re lucky to win just once and I still look at that old medallion and think ‘Wow! That was me’. But to do it with my own label is just incredible.” In the old days at Hardys, he was making wines to win awards. The difference now is he’s making wines that – just like those great Northern Rhônes from 2010 – he loves to drink. It seems he’s not alone on that count.
“I’ve invested a lot more in this than when I won with Hardys. When we first started doing this we couldn’t have imagined it; it was impossible. That brings an immense amount of satisfaction. And it’s fun. I love it – and I love that people get it now.”

*A version of this article appeared on the CellarHand website. CellarHand is both the author’s employer and the distributor of S.C. Pannell wines in Victoria and NSW.

Call That A Challenge?

I’m writing this post on a Friday night with a glass of Mornington Peninsula Chardonnay to keep me company. I can’t say too much about how good it is, as I do casual work for its producer and don’t wish to stand accused of bias. It’s a bit like refusing to save a drowning man because you work for the company that makes the lifejackets, but there you have it.
Bonnezeaux Gonzo is in its infancy, and there are certain strategic points that have yet to be worked out. One of these is how to tackle the Chardonnay thing: does its brilliance need a bombshell or is it a question of attrition, a barrage of allusions to its wondrousness to leave readers dumbstruck?
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For now I’ll go for the latter, because it’s getting late and I’m onto my second glass. So here’s a little rave about some already raved-about wines, based on my notes from the recent Sommeliers Australia tasting of trophy-winning wines from the James Halliday Chardonnay Challenge at Vue de Monde.
We blind tasted three flights of four wines, all of which came top in their region. Discovery of the day for me appeared in the first bracket. It was the Ridgemill Estate WYP Chardonnay 2012 from the Granite Belt in Queensland. It has a floral, orange-blossom nose with grilled nuts, leading into a full-bodied palate of ripe peach, apricots and honey and finishing long with apricots and lemon slice.
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The second flight was all Victoria, and a strong showing it was, too. The most distinctive was the Galli Estate Pamela Chardonnay 2011 ($60) from Sunbury. This was taut, mineral and intense, with ruby grapefruit and green apple followed by a pure citrus and stone fruit finish. The acid was bracing, hard even, but it worked for me. I was also very taken by the Seville Estate Reserve Chardonnay 2012 (RRP for the 2011 was $33) from the Yarra Valley, which I liked even better than the previous vintage, which recently came up trumps at the Royal Melbourne Wine Awards. Full-bodied with nuttiness, cream, peach and grapefruit, what really took me here was the way it powered through the back palate. Such drive to back up that generosity.
But my favourite of this bracket was the A.Rodda Smiths Vineyard Chardonnay 2012 from Beechworth ($38). It all seemed to be on show from the first sniff – smoke, nuts, peach and lemon – and yet the palate was toned and restrained, with fresh, pure nectarine and citrus fruit meted out ahead of a finish that was creamy, long and moreish.
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Then the final flight, which featured Tyrrell’s Vat 47 Chardonnay 2009 ($70) from the Hunter Valley (for some dumb reason I’m always surprised by how much I love this wine – and the 2009 is looking super fresh), and the Xanadu Chardonnay 2010 ($35) from Margaret River (which seemed a bit obvious and plump at first, but in time showed depth and nuance). It also contained the Penfolds Reserve Bin 10A 2010 ($95) from the Adelaide Hills, a wine with quite a reputation – well won, I’d have to say. It had complexity in spades – spice and zing, a bit of grip and a gamut of pure-fruit aromas powerfully expressed. Gorgeous.
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The 10A was my preferred wine of the bracket, followed by the wine that came top in the Halliday Chardonnay Challenge: the Seppelt Drumborg Vineyard Chardonnay 2011 ($40) from Henty. It was flinty and fine-boned with a lovely lemon-lime acid line, great fruit purity, and – a feature of many of these wines – effortless drive. It was complete and utterly delicious.

Far From Home Nebbiolo

It’s hosing down with rain outside, it’s five in the morning, I can’t sleep – and I don’t care. Why not? Because I’m in Milan, and in a couple of hours I’ll be heading down to Barolo to taste some of my favourite wines in the stunning landscape in which they were grown. And to plant the idea that I’m not just a loser that sits up at night in a darkened room blogging about Nebbiolo, I’ll be meeting my parents and a couple of great English mates who’ve flown down especially.
So here’s a bit of jetlagged reminiscing about a lovely wine from the other side of the world. I’m not going to bang on about what a great bloke Steve Pannell is or how wonderful all his wines are – though these things are manifestly true – because I still harbour hopes of some shut-eye before the bus goes.
So: Nebbiolo. Hunting for a good ‘un in Australia can be an expensive hobby – in general, our best Nebs are ahead of us and Italians start pricey. On that point, though, the chap who set up this blind tasting also brought along a Marcarini ‘Lasarin’ 2012 from the Langhe ($30 at Vino Italiano). It was very good (juicy strawberry, liquorice, balsamic) but didn’t quite muster the light-and-shade complexity that makes the grape so exciting.

S.C. Pannell Nebbiolo 2009 Adelaide Hills

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Bright light ruby with an orange-pink tinge, this has an enticing nose of roses, strawberry, orange peel, earth, tar and charcoal. Strawberries, black cherries and plums float along the medium-bodied palate, accompanied by an orangey tang and some spice. As one would expect, there are tannins aplenty but these are fine, savoury and sit back nicely, combining with lively acid to drive it out to a long and lovely conclusion. Satisfyingly complex and complete. Bravo.

Costs $50 from the Prince Wine Store, Melbourne – Alcohol 14.5% – Tasted 14/10/13

Tolpuddle of Tasmania

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If Adelaide Hills producer Shaw + Smith was going to make a good wine in Tasmania, it wasn’t going to be by accident. “It’s a shit-hot vineyard. This is off the shelf. This is not bespoke.”
Michael Hill Smith’s words at the lunch to launch the 2012 Tolpuddle wines betrayed all the excitement he and Martin Shaw felt at acquiring such a precious piece of land in mid-2011. The vineyard was planted in 1988 and its back story is a roll call of great cool-climate wines – fruit had been used for Eileen Hardy Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and by many of Australia’s finest exponents of sparkling wine: Chandon, Heemskerk, House of Arras.
Michael wasn’t so keen on the name but had decided to stick with it. Good move, I reckon. It sounds a little cutesy and the label’s pretty conservative, but Tolpuddle has a great history beyond wine. It’s named after the Tolpuddle Martyrs, a group of men from Dorset, England, sent as convicts to Australia for setting up a farmers’ union. The leader of the group was a chap with the evocative name of George Loveless, who worked on part of the property that is now Tolpuddle Vineyard.
The vineyard won the inaugural award for Tasmanian Vineyard of the Year in 2006, and used to be worked on by Ray Guerin in his capacity as viticulturist for Hardys. Ray is now viticulturist at Shaw + Smith – and Gourmet Traveller WINE’s Viticulturist of the Year 2013. So it would seem the stars are aligned for some pretty good wine.

Tolpuddle Vineyard Chardonnay 2012 (RRP $65)

Nerdy stuff: Fruit was handpicked, whole bunch pressed and fermented mostly wild into French oak barriques (roughly a third new, a third one year old and a third two year old). About 20% went through malolactic fermentation. It spent about 10 months on lees, with occasional battonage.

What it was like: There’s nothing meek about this wine as you approach it. The colour is medium to deep lemon, and the nose fairly pronounced with lemon, white peach and a whiff of earth. It’s strong and forceful across the palate, getting on for full bodied and with great drive and fruit purity. A really fine, dry acid line keeps it taut, but there’s nothing hard about it. Bracing, yes, with a long finish of lime and white stone fruits. Impressive. Drink now to 2017+

Tolpuddle Vineyard Pinot Noir 2012 (RRP $75)

Nerdy stuff: Grapes were hand picked, fermented in open fermenters and hand plunged, with an average of 25% whole bunches. The wine was then aged in French oak barriques (roughly a third new) for 10 months.

What it was like: Amazing perfume. As with the Chardonnay, leaves you in no doubt that this is going to grab your attention. Exceptionally floral, especially violets, plus cherries and earth-encrusted mushrooms. It’s smooth-textured and vigorous in the mouth, mostly primary fruit (strawberry compote and cherries) that pulses through to the long finish. Very good acid and tannin structure. Drink now to 2020.

Overall, the Chardonnay edged it for me but both wines show real strength of identity and structure. Generous but measured, and very drinkable.

I attended this lunch on 14/10/13 as a guest of Shaw + Smith