One of the most frustrating things about being stuck in Melbourne during this pandemic lockdown is not being able to visit any of the great winemakers fringing my city. They’re all so close, and yet the prospect of seeing them again feels so far away.
Normally, I can hop in my car and drive an hour in any direction—north to the Macedon Ranges, south to the Mornington Peninsula, east to the Yarra Valley, west to Geelong— and be walking through the narrow rows of a close-planted pinot noir vineyard, or tasting new-vintage chardonnay from the barrel in a cool cellar.
More frustratingly for me, if I could leave the city right now, I could also be discovering the winemakers’ latest side hustles: the debut vintage of a newly planted grape variety, perhaps, or the trial of an experimental technique, or the first crop from a new vineyard.
It’s often these new and exciting side-hustle wines that keep me heading out to the vineyards. Well, they will—as soon as it’s safe to travel again.
MICHAEL DHILLON
Bindi Wines, Macedon Ranges
Main game: Since the Dhillon family first planted vines at Bindi in the late 1980s, the single-minded focus of winemaker Michael Dhillon has been how to best capture this quartz-strewn country through the lens of chardonnay and pinot noir. In an effort to narrow this focus, Michael has established new blocks of very-close-planted pinot—11,300 vines per hectare, on a low trellis—and has plans for more on even stonier corners of the property.
Side hustle: Twenty years ago, Dhillon made some shiraz for the first time from a vineyard at Colbinabbin in Heathcote, a much warmer inland region to the north, famous for its dark, dense blockbuster reds. He picked the grapes a fortnight earlier than anyone else, aiming for more of a “syrah” style: The resulting wine, called Pyrette, was—and continues to be—a benchmark for elegance. It has also been very influential. “For the first ten vintages at least,” says Dhillon, “when other growers heard I was picking my shiraz, they’d say, ‘Are you sure?’ Now people say, ‘When is Michael picking? We’ll pick a week after that.’”
Over the last couple of years, Dhillon has also been sourcing shiraz and grenache grapes from a stonier site farther south in Heathcote, and will be releasing a red and a rosé under a new label, Dhillon, later this year.
“Bindi’s a simple story,” says Dhillon. “It’s about the vineyard around the house; it’s about the place. The Dhillon label will be personality-driven, flexible. The good thing about side hustles is they’re so different.”
More: bindiwines.com.au; imported by Vine Street Imports, Mount Laurel, NJ
NICK FARR
Wines by Farr, Geelong
Main game: Winemaker Gary Farr helped establish Geelong as a leading region for chardonnay and pinot noir back in the 1980s, first at Bannockburn Vineyards and then across the road at his family’s winery. Nick Farr has been making wine alongside his father (who is now retired) for 20 years.
Side hustle: As well as making wines under the By Farr label, Nick also has his own label called Farr Rising, which includes one of the best Australian examples of gamay, from a block of vines planted in 2014.
More recent plantings on the Farr family vineyard include nebbiolo and garganega. “I’ve been reading more and more about what varieties hold acidity in a warming world,” says Nick. “About what’s going to work here in twenty years’ time. When Dad started making wine in Geelong in the late seventies, cabernet and riesling were king. Now hardly anyone grows them anymore. I want to make sure there’s something in the vineyard for my kids that can produce wine with texture and minerality and fineness.”
Nick also makes chardonnay and pinot from a much cooler, wetter vineyard site called Irrewarra, to the southwest. Planted almost 20 years ago, the vineyard is dry-grown and produces fruit that’s finer, more savory and more nervy than that grown in Geelong. “The first two years I worked with the Irrewarra pinot, I fermented using whole bunches, which is very much a Farr thing,” says Nick. “But it just didn’t work, so now it’s completely destemmed. The vineyard had taught me a lesson: It told me I needed to get over myself, to stop being so pig-headed.”
More: byfarr.com.au; imported by Hudson Wine Brokers, Los Angeles, CA; irrewarravineyard.com.au; imported by GPS, Mill Valley, CA
MAC FORBES
Mac Forbes Wines, Yarra Valley
Main game: This year, winemaker Mac Forbes released a new range of chardonnay and pinot noir called “Villages”: four bottlings of each variety, all from the 2019 vintage, from distinct subregions in the Yarra Valley, earlypicked (alcohol levels hover around 11 percent), detailed, translucent and cellar worthy. They’re a culmination of 15 years of work with these two varieties in various locations across the region. Chardonnay and pinot are, he says, the core of what he does. But they’re far from the only thing he does.
Side hustle: The EB, or “Experimental Batch,” range came about early on in the story of Mac Forbes Wines, when a parcel of footstomped pinot was left in barrel—“we forgot about it”—for 30 months, and it ended up tasting quite unlike any of the other pinots he made. Since then, the label has been used to release small bottlings of boundary-pushing, eye-opening wines, from chardonnay aged under flor to fortified cabernet to riesling spontaneously fermented in concrete. (Forbes also makes a range of more conventional rieslings, with varying levels of residual sweetness—he calls the range “RS”—using grapes sourced from a vineyard high in the granite hills of the Strathbogie Ranges, north of the Yarra Valley.)
“EB, as a concept, is as much about empowering the people who work in the cellar as it is about making small batches of wine for bars looking for something different,” says Forbes.
“I’m fiercely protective of EB. I consider the wines core to our enjoyment and learning in the winery. If the people who work here feel we can all pose questions, run trials, do new things, it increases the understanding of everything we do.”
More: macforbes.com; imported by Hudson Wine Brokers, Los Angeles, CA
KATE MCINTRYE
Moorooduc Estate, Mornington Peninsula
Main game: The McIntyre family established Moorooduc Estate in 1982; it was part of the first wave of medicos-turned-vignerons that kick-started Victoria’s boutique wine boom. Since then, winemaker Richard McIntrye has established a glowing reputation for classical chardonnay, pinot gris and pinot noir, both from his family’s own vineyards and from other long-term growers.
Side hustle: Richard’s daughter, Kate McIntyre, a Master of Wine and the family company’s marketing manager, had been fascinated by the extended-skin-contact white, amber and ramato wines she tasted on her travels through Italy. In 2015, she convinced her father to let her have a go at making one.
“I kept annoying Dad until he gave me half a ton of pinot gris grapes to play with,” she says. “Enough for one barrel. He was very skeptical. He made me promise that if it didn’t work out, I would get rid of it myself.”
But it did work out. The dusky pink-purple color of the fully ripe pinot gris grapes produced a wine that glowed crimson, like a rosé, but the extended skin contact brought a tannic grip that made it taste more like a red. Since that first experimental vintage, the Pinot Gris on Skins has become a permanent fixture in the lineup at Moorooduc, and one of the best sellers at cellar door.
More: moorooducestate.com.au; imported by Little Peacock, NY and H. Mercer, Los Angeles, CA
SAM MIDDLETON
Mount Mary, Yarra Valley
Main game: Sam Middleton is the grandson of the irascible Dr. John Middleton, one of the visionary vignerons who re-established a wine industry in the Yarra Valley in the early 1970s (the region had been home to some grand wine estates a hundred years earlier). Sam is doing a great job of finessing the wines his late grandfather developed—complex chardonnay, earthy pinot noir and the classic, long-lived Yarra wines Triolet, a blend of semillon, sauvignon and muscadelle, and Quintet, a blend of the main five Bordeaux red grapes.
Side hustle: Over the last few years, in response to a warming, drying climate, the Middleton family has expanded the Mount Mary vineyard with grape varieties originally from the south of France: white marsanne, roussanne and clairette; red grenache, shiraz, mourvedre and cinsault. Sam Middleton uses these to great effect to make two wines—a textural white and a savory, spicy red, both released under the Mount Mary Marli Russell label, named in tribute to his grandmother.
Before returning to his family’s vineyard, Middleton worked in other wineries, including Coldstream Hills—established in the 1980s by wine writer James Halliday—where he met Will Byron and Kaspar Hermann. The three set up a label called Onannon to make wine from purchased grapes grown on the Mornington Peninsula and a little farther east, in Gippsland.
More recently, Middleton has joined forces with top Yarra winemaker Franco d’Anna and a mutual friend, footballer Jordan Lewis, to produce single-vineyard chardonnay and pinot under the DML label.
“For me, collaboration is really interesting,” says Middleton. “At Mount Mary, it’s me making the winemaking decisions, and there is not always someone there to challenge my opinion. But when you work with other winemakers, it challenges you to think outside the square. And I think you can see the result of that in my own wines.”
More: mountmary.com.au
Based in Melbourne, Max Allen has been covering Australian wine for nearly 30 years, as a columnist for the Australian Financial Review and a contributor to Gourmet Traveller Magazine, among many others. He’s just released his latest book, Intoxicating: Ten Drinks that Shaped Australia (Thames & Hudson, 2020).
This story appears in the print issue
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