Focused, powerful and lifted aromas of citrus blossoms, jasmine tea, pome fruits, lime, grapefruit, nectarine, cashew, hazelnut, toasted oats, nougat, white pepper, ginger, sweet dusty spices and a touch of brine.
In the mouth it’s powerful, intense and has an immediate punch of flavour, acidity and tannin. Concentrated pome, apple warheads, peppery citrus, slightly bitter stonefruit, hints of musk candy and ginger ignite the palate, charged by intense mineral-edged acidity and gripped with firm drying tannins. It holds, rather than drives, and coils with tension and tightness into a fist in the midpalate, reverberating in flavour and acidity. If the Tiers is elegant and quietly spoken, this is boisterous and loud. It ends with a tang of sour apple and a hum of cinnamon toast. A Chardy for those that like it kicking.
A pretty, perfumed and finely detailed nose of sweet citrus and apple blossoms, apple gums, donut peach, honeydew, honeyed cashew, white pepper, dried galangal and gently woven spice.
In the mouth it’s tightly coiled, tense and shaped like a Barracuda; streamlined, slender, precisely proportioned and powerfully poised. A concentrated drive of pure fruit and subtle spice flavours echo the nose, charged by tense grapefruit-like acidity and textured dry with tight grained sappy tannins. It moves fast, effortlessly and glides straight down the centre of the palate. There’s a wonderful waltz between standoff-ish intensity, and endearing elegance that I adore and it ends over an incredibly long tail that hums with ginger, lemon, lime, a touch of apricot and spice. An awesome release that’s to hit the market soon enough.
From a close planted block established in 2003. Bernard clones 76 and 95. It’s distinctly different to the Tiers old vine Chardonnay as a result, and I tend to think it’s the clonal selection that’s the biggest point of difference. Anyway, look at how well this wine has done at TWF over the years – HERE.
Pear, grapefruit, green banana, almond biscotti and spice, bread dough and some honey/floral perfume, with just a tiny bit of matchstick. It’s juicy and flavoursome, but tight in acidity, with a distinctly flinty texture, along with a creamy nougat richness, and a tight citrus finish of excellent length. Wonderful wine.
The vines used for Tiers were planted in 1981, which is pioneering territory for Adelaide Hills. The clone is unknown, though they think it’s related to the cuttings brought in by James Busby in 1832.
There’s a bit of ooomph and weight to this wine, though it’s still clearly ‘fine wine’. Pear, banana, cashew and spice. It’s glossy and slick, but has a good cut of grapefruity acidity to offset, and the finish is long and offers powdery grip to close. A little more generous than some years, I feel, but very good Chardonnay here.
This has to rank up there with the best of the Tiers Vineyard chardies yet released. It was an ever so slightly warmer vintage than the previous and this is reflected in the depth and fruit concentration expressed with relative opulence. Lots of nectarine, and cashew with a spicy pear edge to it. The fine chalky acid really holds the tension ensuring a defined and exceptionally long finish. A dry savoury and tight subtle astringency on the finish provides the final flourish to an outstanding wine.
The close spaces planting of this part of the Tiers vineyard imparts a slightly different flavour and textural feel to the chardonnays from the old Tiers plantings. Intense aromas of tropical fruits, brioche and spices. The palate is ripe and textured although the chalky acid and light citrus edge hold the definition and line through to the long finish. Supremely balanced with the oak and fruit integration seamless and refined. Excellent wine.
From a cool vintage, although not as cool as the ’23. This is a delightful chardonnay from the Piccadilly Valley with a vibrant freshness and energy which is complemented by the subtle stone fruit characters. Fine savoury notes with lemony chalky characters that balanced the beautifully pristine fruit. The finish is dry and slightly savoury. The flavour profile through the palate is long and sustained.
A lovely cool year with destemmed berries. Matured in one third new barriques for eight months. Satsuma plum, wild raspberries and Alpine strawberries. A cherry blossom prettiness and pulled paperbark earthiness. Dry powdery tannins surge forward providing a veil across the palate and allowing the nutmeg and cinnamon dust spice to dance. The wine is totally enthralling in its lacey tannin elegance and delicate dotted red fruit. Drinking beautifully now but will have close to 6-8 years further drinking window. One of the prettiest vintages of this wine I’ve seen, serve this with a duck terrine and you’ll be floating amongst the clouds.
The second release of the Definitus, sourced from a specific block within the Foggy Hill Northwestern slope. Here in the warmer vintage we see the aging potential of this unique bottling. Boysenberries, ironstone, cured meats and five spice. A potent Morello cherry core is woven with sumac and wattleseed spice. The palate takes on new life with real concentration of fruit and then a wonderland of sinewy tannins. Fruit is the final word and why you need to taste and see these wines to believe them. There is still another 5 or so years for this wine to tell its story. A fitting pairing for tea smoked duck and ancient grains.
The march towards ever more delicate versions of the Tapanappa Foggy Hill Pinot Noir continues. Each vintage, this Fleurieu Peninsula wine gets a little more contained, with a bit more Pinosity. That’s not saying the previous vintages of Brian Croser’s Pinot South Australian Pinot Noir opus haven’t looked like varietal, just that this wine can sometimes choose power over seduction. Interestingly, I feel this Tapanappa Foggy Hill Vineyard Pinot Noir 2023 has an Adelaide Hills vibe to it – something about the dark cherry fruit, which gives this a Lenswood Pinot Noir feel to get all nerdy. That has to be about the season, with 2023 at Foggy Hill recording a heat summation of 1233°C (expressed in Heat Degree Days), well below the 1336°C average. Lucid red, ripe and powerful, this is still a fuller style, with fruits that lean into the darker end of the red cherry spectrum and a whisper of bacon. The oak drives this along too, offering an extra layer, to what is already a layered wine. Medium, and maybe even medium to full-bodied, there’s a statement about the length that feels right – like it’s no bullshit, blue-chip, expensive suit-wearing Pinot Noir, but delivered with extra finesse and coolness this vintage. I like.
A warm and dry vintage for the region in 2019, which helped ensure that the Whalebone Vineyard, planted 45 years ago, had a very small yield. The wine is a blend of 85% Cabernet and 15% Shiraz. The Shiraz comes from the Crayères Vineyard. After destemming, the two varieties were fermented separately, after cold soaking. A week’s maceration on skins followed. Malolactic fermentation was in French oak barriques, half new and half single use, before 17 months of maturation. 670 dozen under cork. Deep maroon in colour, the nose gives aromas of black fruits, warm earth, cigar box notes, tobacco leaves and toasty oak. There are hints of vanilla, nutmeg, chocolate, dried herbs and cassis. Showing good length and fine tannins, this is an attractive style for drinking over the best part of the next decade. Drink now–2034
Confusingly, this new, limited-edition model from the Croser stable is from Mount Barker SA, not the more common Mt Barker WA. Regardless it’s amazingly fragrant and exceptionally easy to drink despite its nearly 15 per cent. 9.5/10.
This is about as fashionable as merlot gets, however, just because you have money, doesn’t mean you have taste, in which case buy this to cover it up. Scrumptious red wine for the rich and fashionable. 9.5/10.
There are very few Australian Pinot releases where you crack a bottle open and think, ‘This needs six years’. It just doesn’t happen. Bindi, maybe, some of the structured Yarra Pinot releases (Mount Mary sometimes), Bannockburn, By Farr, Domaine A. It’s a small collection. (I had a stab at a cellarworthy Pinot list many moons ago. It still stands).
But I should add the Tapanappa Definitus to that list.
Three years ago, I commented that this Tapanappa Definitus Foggy Hill Pinot Noir 2018 was a Bordeaux-drinker’s Pinot Noir – not dismissively, but more as a remark about the power and weight. Now it has been re-released, and it is even more drinkable.
A special bottling from a select few rows on Brian Croser’s Foggy Hill Vineyard, this Pinot is maturing in a welcome way. Coppery-coloured, it smells of mulch and spiced cherries, with a cherry clove autumnal vibe that feels developed but also has fruit and power. There’s something of the drying, windswept dried berry concentration that you see in Martinborough Pinot tbh, which makes sense from a climate perspective, but something that I’ve never noticed in this wine before. Interesting. It’s secondary, complex and just good drinking. I’m a fan.
Best drinking: good now, no hurry. 18.5/20, 94/100. 14%, $125. Would I buy it? Let’s share a bottle.
The red berry scent is complemented by hints of star anise, mint and high quality oak. Lingering varietal flavour carries the tannin firmness well. Needs 3-5 years.
Grapes rotting on vines; billions of bottles’ worth of wine sitting in tank farms, wanted by no one. Australia’s inland bulk wine producers are in crisis, causing an image problem for the wider industry.
BRIAN CROSER claps a heavy hand on my shoulder and drags me in from the cold. The South Australian winemaker is heading into his 56th vintage, polishing his memoirs, and wrestling with a demon – the demon of regret. But first, a glass of his Tapanappa chardonnay and a polemical pinot noir – served to make a point. There’s no better place to be on a rain-thrashed night, it occurs to me, than the home of a genial vigneron.
Croser’s name will be forever linked to Petaluma, the premium brand he launched in the late 1970s with fruit from Piccadilly Valley – Croser was the first winemaker to plant here – in the Adelaide Hills. Swallowed up by global booze behemoth Lion Nathan in 2001 Petaluma, the brand and the winery, has since been passed like a baton from one owner to the next, along with Croser’s eponymous bubbly. With his stern gaze, patrician tone and moustache, as meticulously tended as his vines, Croser has served for the past few decades as unofficial spokesman for, and critic of, the industry that’s been his life. He is described to me by Andrew Caillard, author of The Australian Ark, a three-volume history of Australian wine, as “singularly the most important wine figure of his generation”.
On this stormy night in the Piccadilly Valley, I find 76-year-old Croser the vigneron a model of serenity; Croser the wine industry statesman – not so much. The walls of his study are scattered with photos of his wife, Ann, and their three daughters, and a farrago of wine mementos. The most significant of these is a 2004 cover of Decanter magazine, the global wine industry’s bible, anointing Croser “man of the year”.
The moment I pull up a chair, he gets straight to the point. “Yes, I’ve been a successful winemaker,” he declares, as if prompted by the Decanter cover. “But in one important respect, I’ve failed. Hundreds of speeches and I’ve not been able to guide us in the right direction: towards quality. For decades, nothing changed. And now, well, so much is going to change – because it has to.”
As Croser sees it, the Australian wine industry has split into a “fine-wine community of more than 2000 committed and regionally diverse producers” and a shrinking number of big companies. Three of these wine behemoths – Treasury Wine Estates, Accolade Wines and Pernod Ricard – are among the world’s biggest. But the Monopoly board of world wine is constantly in play and Pernod Ricard recently sold its wine businesses to Accolade. It’s in the nature of these big operations to maintain a few halo brands – Accolade owns Petaluma, Treasury maintains Penfolds – while also producing budget export wine en masse in the hot inland regions of the Riverland, Riverina and Murray- Darling. According to Wine Australia, in the 12 months to September 2024, the warm inland regions – under the label South Eastern Australia – accounted for 79 per cent of the volume of wine exported below $10 per litre.Both bulk- and fine-wine makers have “commercial legitimacy” in Croser’s eyes. The problem is that from the mid-1990s, the bulk-wine sector underwent steroidal growth, exporting increasing volumes of budget bottled wine, casks and shipping containersized wine bladders at ever-diminishing prices. But since 2020, demand for bulk wine has crashed, with formerly welcoming markets – chiefly the US – turning flaky as early as 2008. The value of Australian wine exports to the UK peaked in 2007 at $990 million and had fallen to $362 million by September this year. As a result, lakes of low-end Australian wine are filling “tank farms” in warehouses here and abroad. As of June 2023, there were 2.19 billion litres of wine in stock across Australia – in bottles, barrels and steel tanks.
These wine reservoirs, representing more than two-and-a-half times the volume of Australia’s annual exports, aren’t going anywhere fast because nobody wants them. Croser has long feared mass-produced, low-end wine’s domination of the export market and its potential to “obscure” the small players – the makers of fine wine, or at least regionally varied and interesting wine. And now there’s the “current tragedy”, as he calls it, in the vast, irrigated flatlands.
Ahead of our meeting, Croser sends a sketch of the industry’s agonies. His source is a report by wine economist Kym Anderson, approved by state and federal agriculture ministers in July and awaiting a ministerial response. Commissioned by the government’s Viticulture and Wine Sector Working Group, the report describes how the average price of red-wine grapes in the hot inland regions (for growers lucky enough to find a buyer) fell to near-record lows in each of the three vintages to 2024. “Together with low yields in 2023, many small growers have been struggling to put food on their table,” Anderson’s report says. “Wineries with unsold wine are also struggling, especially those with tanks full of wine from previous vintages.” Riverland growers are lucky to get $150 a tonne for their grapes. In the industry’s new coolclimate frontier of Tasmania, by contrast, wine grapes fetch close to $4000 a tonne. The lucrative Chinese market collapsed in 2020 with the imposition of crushing tariffs, and while their removal this year has triggered a surge in the value of Australian wine exports, the bounce-back won’t ease the pain experienced inland. The status-sensitive Chinese are buying premium wine in relatively small volumes, not bucketloads of budget wine.
The analyst at industry body Wine Australia, Peter Bailey, explains that the return of China this year soaked up the equivalent of 59 million litres, whereas surplus red wine nationally leading into the 2024 vintage was about 400 million litres.
“China is not going to solve any oversupply issues,” he says. The unpalatable truth for the Australian wine industry is that mass-produced, lowend wine – our specialisation – is the dying sector of the global market. Says Bailey: “That’s the end of the market that’s declining, and that’s the end of the market where Australia has its biggest profile. People around the world are reducing their consumption at that end of the market. It’s in decline, and will continue to decline.”
While the crisis is not of Brian Croser’s making, it weighs heavily all the same. Like many Australian winemakers, he was cheered by the international recognition given to Australian winemaking from the early 1980s. No longer an Anglo-Irish outpost of beer, bangers and mash, Australia seen through wine-tinted glasses was a Mediterranean-like culture attuned to its climate and post-war, wine-drinking migrant communities. The industry’s failure to galvanise around the “fine wine scene” – well-established by the early 1990s – is seen by critics like Croser as a form of commercial self- harm. Rather than chase quality, the industry chased volume; instead of nurturing the reputation of Australian wine, it debased that reputation in the pursuit of short-term profit. Around 60 per cent of Australian wine leaves our shores in shipping containers, mostly as bulk in outsized rubber bladders. The average price of our exported wine is a lowly $3.72 a litre.
“From the 1990s, we had massive growth of the industry,” Croser says. “Not all of it for export – the domestic industry was growing as well. By the end of the 1990s, the inland areas of Australia had been overplanted with vines. There was competition between Orlando’s Jacob’s Creek, Casella’s Yellowtail, Hardys’ Nottage Hill, Koonunga Hill from Penfolds, and these companies were offering generous contracts to inland grape growers – they all wanted a share of this booming market. There was added fuel in the form of tax incentives. Big investors entered the market.
“By 2010, it was obvious that the inland areas had been way overplanted,” Croser says. “At the same time, budget brands had become the main image of Australian wine overseas – that image was now dominated by the inland areas, hot-climate wine, sold in supermarkets, produced on an industrial scale.” The suggestion that Australian wine was “industrial”, tricked-up, or fake had become an established trope in international wine appreciation.
“The image of industrial winemaking overshadowed the fine-wine industry, making it harder for Australian fine wine to be recognised on its own terms.”
There’s a touch of the Jedi Knight wielding his lightsaber against the dark side of the Force in Croser’s argument with the “inlanders”, as he calls them. Is it really so cut-and-dried?
The topography of the Australian wine industry is fiendishly complicated. The big companies that run the inland industry are, in some cases, the same companies that own, support and promote some of the country’s finest wines. House of Arras, the winner in 2020 of a Decanter gong for world’s best sparkling, was until recently in the Accolade fold; Grange Hermitage is a product of Penfolds, which is owned by Treasury. Croser’s abiding passion, he insists, is quality. But quantity, for the past quarter of a century, has ruled.
“There are influential people in the industry who say that all Australian wine is fine wine,” he tells me. “The biggest challenge for Australian wine broadly is the negative and deteriorating image problem created by the behaviour and travails of the branded commodity [mass-produced budget] wine industry. We need to bridge the gap between the increasingly poor external perception of Australian wine and the realities of Australia’s vibrant fine-wine community as it exists in the 65 fine-wine regions of Australia, 24 of which are as cool or cooler than Bordeaux in France.” Swish goes the lightsaber. Swish. Swish.
NEXT MORNING, I set out for the South Australian Riverland to view the “tragedy”, to use Croser’s word, or at least the “crisis” evoked by economist Kym Anderson. I’ve been invited to a seminar for grape growers struggling to make ends meet, organised by Riverland winemaker and entrepreneur Ashley Ratcliff.
Leaving the manicured slopes of the Adelaide Hills, I head west from the Mount Lofty range into sheep country and scrub. Once in the flats, I’m on a ribbon of road leading past towns bearing traces of German settlement Schubert Street, and a rivulet named after the Rhine until anti-German wartime sentiment forced a name-change to the French river Marne. Crossing the copper-coloured Murray by car ferry at Swan Reach, I drive to the regional hub of Berri, past an ocean of vines as the sky purples and a distant storm sweeps across the hard-cut horizon.
The vineyards should be neat, bare and carefully pruned at this time of the year as they await the bud-burst of spring. And many are. But here and there I pass vines abandoned or neglected. I pull over and walk a row. Bunches of desiccated red wine grapes, like black petals, turn lightly in the northerly wind that shears across the flatland. A bitter harvest – 2024. Size matters a great deal to the Riverland wine industry.
A jolly yellow and blue online brochure boasts a 410,888-tonne wine grape crush in 2023, “accounting for 62 per cent of South Australia’s and 34 per cent of Australia’s annual crush”. But statistics also speak to the region’s despair. The Riverland grape crush for 2023 was the lowest in a decade. This year, it declined a further 5 per cent. It’s expected to decline again next year.
In the 12 months to April, about 120 hectares of Riverland vines were torn out as grape prices crashed or, in the bureaucratic phrasing of Wine Australia, showed “a significant downward shift”. Ratcliff’s Ricca Terra label has established a reputation for quality and innovation in the Riverland. He has planted grape varieties such as arinto and souzao from Portugal, which he blends with southern Italian varieties including nero d’avola to create unlikely mixed marriages. For sure, he sees “a lot of pain in these parts”, he tells me. But he’s an entrepreneur, and when he looks to the future, as he habitually does, any number of alternative agricultural pathways open up: olives, pistachios, pomegranates, to name a few. When not promoting these off-ramps for struggling grape growers, he’s working hard to prove a point: good wine can be made in the Riverland.
On the morning of Ratcliff’s seminar for grape growers who want out, I meet Martin Bailey, proud owner of a diminutive six-hectare Riverland block.
Bailey is a rangy Kiwi who married a local girl, Judy Till, from a farming family. Her grandfather, Clem, worked what became known as Till Farm under the soldier-settlement scheme for veterans of the Great War. “It was just Mallee scrub in those days,” says Bailey. “Everyone joined together to clear the land and build the homes. Clem Till planted fruit trees and vines for table grapes but in the 1990s, in the wine industry’s boom years, it was all ripped out and the whole block was transplanted with cabernet sauvignon.”
When the couple took over Till Farm in 2017, they were getting about $480 a tonne for their grapes. The price fell to $345 a few years ago, and plummeted to a desperate low of $125 last year. By their reckoning, they’ve earned $35,000 in the past two years from grapes and spent twice that amount watering, fertilising and harvesting the crop.
“People are running away because they can’t make a living,” Bailey tells me over a coffee outside the seminar room. “There are a lot of folk who’d like to be here this morning but aren’t.” He cuts a quick look over his shoulder. “They’re third- or fourth-generation grape growers. It’s shame that keeps them away.”
The region’s grape growers, about half of them “blockies” like Bailey, working soldier-settlement farmlets of 10 hectares or less, provide a contracted volume of grapes to a local cooperative, which sells them to the big producers. He has never been given any encouragement to improve the quality of his grapes, he tells me. “The contract stipulates that they will take all the grapes we can provide, but they don’t want too much MOG [matter other than grapes].” He doesn’t know where or in what form the wine from his grapes makes its way overseas, but he suspects most ends up in casks.
The mayor of the Berri Barmera Riverland region, 33-year-old Ella Winnall, was raised on a soldier-settlement block much like Martin and Judy Bailey’s during the Millennium drought. Her parents got out of grapes towards the end of the drought, turned off the water, and pulled out the vines. She stayed on in the region. “Our community is quite reliant on the wine industry,” she tells me. “When the industry is going through a rough time, we feel it across the whole community – some of our main-street businesses like retail can be hurting just as much.” She repeats a plucky phrase often heard in the Riverland – it’s the “engine room” of the wine export industry. “It’s not all we do here though, we have some incredible grape growers and winemakers who are at the forefront of sustainable winemaking and are producing absolutely banging wines that stand up against anywhere else in Australia.”
I push on down the road to Salena Estate winery, rising from the roadside a few kilometres south of Berri, close by a bend in the Murray River, to find the lights out and no one home but owner-manager Bob Franchitto. Salena, in its prime, was one of the nation’s top 20 wine producers, pumping out 15,000 tonnes a year of bulk, cask, and some premium wine. Franchitto has agreed to meet me six months after his familyowned company went into receivership, owing $25 million, with 5 million litres of unsold bulk wine in storage. The son of post-war migrants, Franchitto is clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair and the unflinching gaze of a realist. Rather than an exit strategy, he’s looking for a financial lifeline. “I still believe there’s a future here but it’s going to be a tough road ahead,” he says over coffee in the empty boardroom of a business that once employed 40 people, ran a cellar door – even a restaurant.
“This has been our life. We built this from nothing. It’d be sad to see it go.” He bought part of the land on which Salena sits in 1991 and he and his wife, Sylvia, planted vines over the next few years. The couple started out with one barrel to share with friends, followed by three the next year, and 30 the year after that. They launched Salena Estate in 1998 with 300 tonnes of mainly cabernet and shiraz. “All the demand was in red,” he says. “In hindsight, it would have been better to have a bit more white.”
Thanks to an organic certification covering half the property, he found an early market in Scandinavia, but it was the Chinese thirst for Aussie red that supersized the 185-hectare Salena Estate. “We first went to China in about 2000 with a few containers a year and then suddenly it started to take off, peaking with 4 million bottles a year. About 70 per cent of our product went to China … But then Scott Morrison poked the dragon and overnight that market was gone.” Franchitto believes the Riverland wine industry needs to shrink by at least 20 per cent to match diminished global demand.
Asked to identify the industry’s biggest missteps, his response is to the point. “There was a plan to increase production to where we were a few years ago. We got there in a hell of a hurry. We got there 20 years ahead of time. It all happened too quickly.”
An hour’s drive north-west of Salena Estate, I pass through Cooltong – “lizard” in the local Aboriginal dialect – and head into irrigated grape and citrusgrowing country, sliced into narrow soldier-settlement blocks facing the red desert: two regions to the immediate north list their official population as zero. It’s platter-flat country, though pretty today with a light dusting of apple-green leaf on the fruit trees and a haze of pale pink blossom over the almonds. I’m here to meet Jack Papageorgiou, a farmer who has been outspoken in his calls for financial assistance packages to help grape growers to either struggle on with dignity or get the hell out.
Where Martin and Judy Bailey are exploring exit options, and Bob Franchitto is pleading with the banks, Papageorgiou has come to feel “imprisoned” on the 30-hectare vineyard he’s worked since 1974. The returns from his vines are so poor, he tells me, he’s been forced to tap his wife Poppy’s superannuation to the tune of $150,000 just to keep going. Heavyset and softly spoken, dressed in baggy jeans and a zipped-up sweater, Papageorgiou invites me into the family home and pours fresh orange juice from his orchard. He’d sell the land if he could find a buyer, but the banks won’t readily finance vineyard sales. “As a grape grower, I’ve seen many challenges, but I just can’t accept the industry has fallen to such a low level,” he says, putting a hand to his furrowed brow. “For the past three years, we’ve been selling grapes below the cost of production. We can’t sustain that. It’s unacceptable.”
The farmlets in this bend of the Murray were opened up by the post-World War I soldier-settlement scheme that lured Clem Till to the Riverland. An irony not lost on Papageorgiou is that many of his neighbours are soldiering on, suffering silently. He has formed a club for grape growers who’ve lost confidence and purpose. Depression, he says, is rife in the Riverland. “You can see it in their eyes,” he tells me. “They’re wondering, ‘What’s the point?’ ”
WHILE I was on the road in the Riverland, the industry released a One Grape & Wine Sector Plan report, acknowledging that the “sector” had been “pushed off course”. For the Australian wine industry to extract itself from the mess it is in, the report stressed the need for “collaborative efforts from all parties …” calling for a “cohesive national brand that unites the sector in promoting Australian wine”. Already, though, it’s clear the wine industry in Tasmania – the industry’s cool-climate El Dorado – is keen to disassociate itself from Australian wine, while many premium winemakers see the inland with its agonies as an oversized chain dragging on their ambitions.
A long, slow-ripening season benefits most table grape varieties, hence the race to the country’s southern fringes and its cool uplands. In hot regions, winemakers aiming for some degree of finesse are forced to pick early to maintain a palatable balance of sugar, alcohol and acidity, with a consequent loss of flavour and fruit intensity. Quality sparkling wine from chardonnay and pinot noir – the mainstay of the Tasmanian wine industry – is almost by definition a creature of cooler climates. Grapes for quality bubbly are picked early and sweetened just before corkage with a dollop of sugar syrup: the “dosage”. A half-hour’s drive north of Hobart at Tea Tree, in the Coal River Valley, I pull into the five-hectare vineyard of New Zealand-born and -educated Samantha Connew. The hills under thin spring sunshine are glowing green after weeks of heavy rain. By late February, these hills will bleach out and the sheep will turn dirtygrey. Connew invites me into a small, tidy picking shed, makes coffee and sets a welcoming gift of six speckly eggs from her home-raised chooks on the table. For her Stargazer label, Connew grows a fruit salad of pinot noir, riesling, gamay, chardonnay, pinot blanc, gewürztraminer and pinot gris. Her approach is at once classical and unconventional, her wines a delight. She lives and works in a world far removed from the big-sky Riverland with its industrial-scale tank farms, its unwanted wine lakes, and its air of brittle desperation. Her talk is not of contraction but modest expansion: a few additional hectares under vine and a cellar door aimed at the 27 per cent of visitors to Tasmania who are keen to taste wine. She has never “pursued growth for growth’s sake”, she stresses. “Life can get complicated when you get into that growth cycle. But such is the demand for Tasmanian wine that I’d be stupid not to take advantage.”
Connew started working at Wirra Wirra winery in McLaren Vale more than two decades ago, reeling in the 2007 red winemaker of the year award at the International Wine Challenge. “As soon as we say our wine is not for everyone, everyone wants it,” she says. “It’s the whole scarcity thing.”
For the better part of a century, Tasmanians have been carping about their island state’s not infrequent omissions from the map of Australia. The flourishing Tasmania wine industry now actively disassociates itself from Australia: it is Tasmanian first and foremost.
In Italy, the wine lists of the better restaurants are segmented into regions: Liguria, Tuscany, Alto Adige. Tasmanian wine lists are likely as not to feature Australian wine and, in a separate category, Tasmanian. The term “New-Mania” has been coined in Tasmanian wine marketing circles to express an affinity, viticulturally speaking, with New Zealand. Sheralee Davies, chief executive of Wine Tasmania, tells me: “We want people to consider Tasmanian wine in a global, more than an Australian, context, comparing it with other cool-climate international wine regions, such as parts of New Zealand and the similar things it represents – cool climate, quality and elegance.”
There are fears, nevertheless, that the crisis of the mainland wine industry will be visited on Tasmania, that growth will diminish quality and big investors will come to dominate what has always been a small island industry. Some companies have had a long presence in Tasmania, such as Hill-Smith Family Estates with Jansz sparkling and Dalrymple, and Accolade with Bay of Fires and House of Arras – the latter label recently sold to a relative newcomer, Handpicked Wines. Though based in Victoria’s King Valley, Brown Brothers invested in Tasmania in 2010, with its Devil’s Corner label and vineyards in the Tamar Valley and on the east coast. Western Australia-based Fogarty Wine Group has been busily hoovering up Tasmanian land, vineyards and labels. Adelaide Hills company Bird in Hand recently followed suit with the purchase of a 180-hectare east-coast strip and a wedge of the Tamar Valley. Overseas wine companies and private investors are joining the vine rush; the Champagne house of Mumm makes a Tasmanian sparkling, while the US-based Jackson Family Wines has reportedly signalled its interest in Tasmania. Connew isn’t overly perturbed. Tasmania, in her view, is perfectly placed to resist the trap of gigantism and high-volume wine production. Its twisty, hilly landscape and isolation will likely continue to nurture the future of premium wine. Wine Tasmania predicts that by 2040, Tasmania’s wine sector will be the island economy’s highest contributor, producing about $2 billion in wine value annually. “Our annual crush is 1 per cent of the national total,” Connew says. “And it’s 6 per cent of the total value. That in itself tells you something.”
Kym Anderson and Brian Croser agree we’re not going back to the old, low-end wine export industry, at least not its former scale. People are drinking less wine, less red wine, less cheap wine, less hot-climate wine. There is a deep awareness, too, of the fragility of waterways, particularly the Murray-Darling. Says The Australian Ark’s Caillard: “There will always be a finewine market. But the bulk-wine market is basically unsustainable. We cannot stay in the groove of being a commodity winemaker.”
At the same time, cool-climate premium vineyards don’t have a monopoly on the future of Australian wine. There will always be a place for decent wine that doesn’t break the bank. Croser, despite his decadeslong argument with the inlanders, is full of praise for Ashley Ratcliff’s Ricca Terra label. So, too, is Sarah Burvill, winemaker at Bird in Hand, who over a wine tasting sings the praises of Ratcliff’s grapes and those of growers he’s worked with. “He’s really trying to elevate the quality of Riverland fruit, encouraging growers to give the crop a bit of extra attention, shift the thinking away from big volume, low price,” she tells me.
In late September, Ratcliff swept the field at the 2024 Riverland Wine Show, winning best single-vineyard wine with his Ricca Terra 2023 Soldiers’ Land Shiraz, a nod to good winemaking and a wink to the region’s century-old, soldier-settler heritage. I got word of Ratcliff’s success on the day the devastating spring frost descended on the Riverland. It will likely wipe out a quarter of the 2025 vintage, grinding the region’s already struggling growers deeper into the red Mallee soil. A week later, as this story was being prepared for publication, I learnt from Bob Franchitto that his pleas for a “financial lifeline” had been rejected, and he’d lost Salena. “My life’s work,” he said. “Gone.”
Tapanappa Piccadilly Valley Tiers Vineyard (Alt. 450m) Chardonnay 2023, $110. About as much going on as a chardonnay can provide and all of it good. Somewhat lighter than exxy chardonnays are renowned, and better for it. Alas, few will discover what chardonnay can be, and true, it is merely different in the end and depends what you prefer, but it’s hard to go back.
The 2022 Chardonnay is all class. It unleashes a mouthwatering torrent of stone fruit flavor on the palate, filling it with a rising tide of chalky phenolics, piercing fruit flavor, intense acidity, crushed nuts and brine. Awesome. At under $50 AUD, this is one of the great value premium Chardonnays in Australia.13.7% alcohol, sealed under screw cap.
The 2022 Chardonnay Tiers Vineyard 1.5m is exactly what I expected it to be: excellent. A piercing intensity of flavor is matched by the piercing (and juicy) acidity. It fills the mouth side to side with sapid, staining fruit and lingers long through the finish. A superstar wine. It’s got a massive reputation for a reason. 13.5% alcohol, sealed under screw cap.
*I can still taste it after taking a phone call and coming back to this note.
The Tapanappa 2022 Chardonnay Tiers Vineyard is one of Australia’s great Chardonnays, and that has never been more apparent than in this 2022 vintage. A superstar wine of grand proportions, the fruit has startling intensity in the mouth. The juicy acidity that weaves all elements of the wine together shows the pedigree of the site up in Piccadilly Valley (planted 1979). The phenolics are finely milled, lithe and ductile. What a wine. It’s streamlined, seamless, toasty, so persistent and long, sapid and just so classy. With raw power and open-weave at the back of the palate, drink it now (so many will, and so many will love it). But equally, time will allow this wine to grow and open, and I believe it will be better, even in just a few years. 13.8% alcohol, sealed under screw cap.
What a super wine this is. As we all know, good Chardonnay often comes at a price, given the necessary inputs required to come together. From quality oak, lower-yielding vines and often time spent maturing prior to release, it’s easy to see the costs mounting up; and for this reason, we go to premium producers who are able to realize the quality of the fruit within already existing winery structures. So here, in this 2023 Chardonnay, we see Tapanappa putting their considerable Chardonnay prowess into a wine that officially retails at $60 AUD (available for less if you search for it), and worth every cent of that. On the nose, there is roasted pineapple, baked apples, white and yellow peach, crushed nuts and brine. This flows through to the palate, which is slippery, svelte, spicy and structured by chalky tannins and tightly coiled acidity. Great! 12.5% alcohol, sealed under screw cap.
The 2023 Tiers Vineyard Chardonnay has elderflower and white peach, pressed flowers and kiwi fruit, custard apples and scraped vanilla pod. The wine is delicate but also powerful and finishes in a spooling flourish of flavor and salty acidity. A very smart wine here, it is decidedly cool in feel. Patience will be required in order to see this wine unfurl to its best; for now, it is a floral thing. 12.9% alcohol, sealed under screw cap.
The 2021 B & V Syrah leads with fenugreek and arnica, cassis, blackcurrant and raspberry seed. Once the wine is moving in the glass, it really opens up beautifully. On the palate, the wine is succulent and polished, with plenty of grip and grit from the tannins and seamless flow of the fruit. I find the alcohol more prominent than expected, prompting a check on the back of the bottle: 14.9% alcohol. It’s a little warm through the finish, but some may love that. It is well constructed, complex and intriguing.
The 2018 Definitus Pinot Noir Foggy Hill is darker in the glass than the Foggy Hill Pinot tasted beside it, and this wine enters with a rich cascade of cherry and woodsy spice, forest underbrush/sous bois, aged leather and old books. As an avid book collector, this is a positive, evocative, haunting smell for me. The wine has magnificent length and carry through the finish, where it moves across tapenade/caper brine/anchovy complexity. I feel this wine would grow in stature and intrigue over the course of an evening, especially when assigned to a fine Burgundy glass. A lovely wine, with so much to take in. 14% alcohol, sealed under natural cork.
Hay colour. Light ginger biscuit feels amid crunchy early season white nectarine, spilling into a fresh palate, lime-like citrus juices, with a tangy edge to season the ripe fruit flavours and delicate savoury finishing notes. Neatly crafted styling.
12.5% alc Drink now–2032
From the Hills pioneer Chardonnay vineyard in the Piccadilly Valley, immediately a class above, lovely ripe white stone fruit aromas, subtle creaminess and flaked white nuts, everything deliciously balanced and edged with underlying citrussy acidity, chardonnay fruit magic vital to the end of the day. 12.9% alc Drink now–2034
A flashy and deeply brooding chardonnay with aromas of nectarines, peaches, Meyer lemons and gun smoke. The palate is medium-bodied with vivid acidity and a generous mouthfeel, giving notes of grapefruit pith, orange blossoms and chalk. Very complex with underlying freshness. Excellent. Drink or hold. Screw cap.
Fresh aromas of minerals, lemon peel, gun smoke and grapefruit. The palate is medium-bodied with focused acidity and a textural mouthfeel, giving notes of lime curd, orange blossoms, shortbread, flint and baking spices. Wonderfully balanced, with both power and vivid acidity. Drink or hold. Screw cap.
97 Points
Same winemaking as the Merlot blend, but this wine soaks up the oak perfectly. It’s dark and oak framed, but the core of dark berry minty impact is bold enough to take out. It’s brooding, chocolatey, tannic, and somehow more lively and fresher than the Merlot Cab. I closed my eyes and picked it up as a three-year-old, not five. Black fruit, dark berries, a little cedar, with these sticky, long tannins. If anything, this Cabernet Shiraz gives off Coonawarra vibes, and it feels regal, if a bit closed and grumpy for drinking right now. I will never understand why this wine is 2/3rds the price of the Merlot Cab, with the latter feeling like it’s trying too hard, compared to this Cabernet Shiraz blend, which just feels right (although especially uncompromising in this 2019 release).
Best drinking: wait at least five years, then drink over twenty plus.
18/20, 93/100+
A blend of 55% Merlot and 45% Cabernet Franc, which is standard fare for Bordeaux but an outlier blend in South Australia. 470 dozen produced. Spends 18 months in 50% new and 50% single-use oak, which has a lot of dominant barrel character. Hard to miss the oak, or this wine – it’s black and coffeed with thick dried fruit, caramel oak and warm alcohol. Full-bodied, dark and inky; this is a wine of winemaking as much as fruit, of big impact and tannins and width. But ultimately, it’s a bit overdone – a wine that hits you around the face, with a warm, slightly desiccated, oak and fruit tannins-shaped finish that has you looking for a glass of water and a lie-down.
Best drinking: no hurry, it will live forever. But may never be seductive. 17.5/20, 91/100. 14.4%, $90
Appealing and complex nose of lemon, honey, melon and a touch of spiced peach with some hints of gunflint and oak spice. On the palate it has a lovely balance of freshness and focused fruit, with a refined and quite restrained style, beautifully integrated oak, and a touch of minerality. The finish is long, finely etched and very convincing, with bright acidity providing a refreshing lift.
Hailing from Adelaide Hills’ oldest block of Chardonnay – which was planted in 1979 – is this outstanding white from the brilliant winemaker that is Brian Croser. Although rich in flavours, it’s light in texture, with a clean, citrusy sensation, and a surprisingly moderate 12.5% ABV. As for what you taste, it’s a moreish mix of hazelnuts, toast and ruby grapefruit, complemented by toffee popcorn and tangerine, then peach, and finally, an appealing smoky note of freshly-struck matchstick. Lingering, enlivening, but also age-worthy, this is a truly fine Chardonnay. And one I’d like to try again in five years’ time, when I imagine the delicious mature flavours of honey, dried fruit and roasted coffee would start to emerge.
‘A lot of pain’: The hangover looming from Australia’s budget-wine boom
Grapes rotting on vines; billions of bottles’ worth of wine sitting in tank farms:
many inland wine producers are facing an unpalatable truth.
By Luke Slattery • November 09, 2024 – 05.00am
Grapes rotting on vines; billions of bottles’ worth of wine sitting in tank farms: many inland wine producers are facing an unpalatable truth. Brian Croser claps a heavy hand on my shoulder and drags me in from the cold. The South Australian winemaker is heading into his 56th vintage, polishing his memoirs,
and wrestling with a demon – the demon of regret. But first, a glass of his Tapanappa chardonnay and a polemical pinot noir – served to make a point. There’s no better place to be on a rain-thrashed night, it occurs to me, than the home of a genial vigneron.
Croser’s name will be forever linked to Petaluma, the premium brand he launched in the late 1970s with fruit from Piccadilly Valley – Croser was the first winemaker to plant here – in the Adelaide Hills. Swallowed up by global booze behemoth Lion Nathan in 2001, Petaluma, the brand and the winery, has since been passed like a baton from one owner to the next, along with Croser’s eponymous bubbly. With his stern gaze, patrician tone and moustache, as meticulously tended as his vines, Croser has served for the past few decades as unofficial spokesman for, and critic of, the industry that’s been his life. He is described to me by Andrew Caillard, author of The Australian Ark, a three-volume history of Australian wine, as “singularly the most important wine figure of his generation”.
On this stormy night in the Piccadilly Valley, I find 76-year-old Croser the vigneron a model of serenity; Croser the wine industry statesman – not so much. The walls of his study are scattered with photos of his wife, Ann, and their three daughters, and a farrago of wine mementos. The most significant of these is a 2004 cover of Decanter magazine, the global wine industry’s bible, anointing Croser “man of the year”.
The moment I pull up a chair, he gets straight to the point. “Yes, I’ve been a successful winemaker,” he declares, as if prompted by the Decanter cover. “But in one important respect, I’ve failed. Hundreds of speeches and I’ve not been able to guide us in the right direction: towards quality. For decades, nothing changed. And now, well, so much is going to change – because it has to.”
As Croser sees it, the Australian wine industry has split into a “fine-wine community of more than 2000 committed and regionally diverse producers” and a shrinking number of big companies. Three of these wine behemoths – Treasury Wine Estates, Accolade Wines and Pernod Ricard – are among the world’s biggest. But the Monopoly board of world wine is constantly in play and Pernod Ricard recently sold
its wine businesses to Accolade. It’s in the nature of these big operations to maintain a few halo brands – Accolade owns Petaluma, Treasury maintains Penfolds – while also producing budget export wine en masse in the hot inland regions of the Riverland, Riverina and Murray-Darling. According to Wine Australia, in the 12 months to September 2024, the warm inland regions – under the label South Eastern
Australia – accounted for 79 per cent of the volume of wine exported below $10 per litre.
Both bulk- and fine-wine makers have “commercial legitimacy” in Croser’s eyes. The problem is that from the mid-1990s, the bulk-wine sector underwent steroidal growth, exporting increasing volumes of budget bottled wine, casks and shipping container-sized wine bladders at ever-diminishing prices. But since 2020, demand for bulk wine has crashed, with formerly welcoming markets – chiefly the US turning flaky as early as 2008. The value of Australian wine exports to the UK peaked in 2007 at $990 million and had fallen to $362 million by September this year. As a result, lakes of low-end Australian wine are filling “tank farms” in warehouses here and abroad. As of June 2023, there were 2.19 billion litres of wine in stock across Australia – in bottles, barrels and steel tanks.
These wine reservoirs, representing more than two-and-a-half times the volume of Australia’s annual exports, aren’t going anywhere fast because nobody wants them. Croser has long feared mass-produced, low-end wine’s domination of the export market and its potential to “obscure” the small players – the makers of fine wine, or at least regionally varied and interesting wine. And now there’s the “current tragedy”, as he calls it, in the vast, irrigated flatlands.
Ahead of our meeting, Croser sends a sketch of the industry’s agonies. His source is a report by wine economist Kym Anderson, approved by state and federal agriculture ministers in July and awaiting a ministerial response. Commissioned by the government’s Viticulture and Wine Sector Working Group, the report describes how the average price of red-wine grapes in the hot inland regions (for growers
lucky enough to find a buyer) fell to near-record lows in each of the three vintages to 2024 “Together with low yields in 2023, many small growers have been struggling to put food on their table,” Anderson’s report says. “Wineries with unsold wine are also struggling, especially those with tanks full of wine from previous vintages.” Riverland growers are lucky to get $150 a tonne for their grapes. In the industry’s new cool- climate frontier of Tasmania, by contrast, wine grapes fetch close to $4000 a tonne. The lucrative Chinese market collapsed in 2020 with the imposition of crushing tariffs, and while their removal this year has triggered a surge in the value of Australian wine exports, the bounce-back won’t ease the pain experienced inland.
The status-sensitive Chinese are buying premium wine in relatively small volumes, not bucketloads of budget wine. The analyst at industry body Wine Australia, Peter Bailey, explains that the return of
China this year soaked up the equivalent of 59 million litres, whereas surplus red wine nationally leading into the 2024 vintage was about 400 million litres. “China is not going to solve any oversupply issues,” he says.
The unpalatable truth for the Australian wine industry is that mass-produced, low-end wine – our specialisation – is the dying sector of the global market. Says Bailey: “That’s the end of the market that’s declining, and that’s the end of the market where Australia has its biggest profile. People around the world are reducing their consumption at that end of the market. It’s in decline, and will continue to decline.”
While the crisis is not of Brian Croser’s making, it weighs heavily all the same. Like many Australian winemakers, he was cheered by the international recognition given to Australian winemaking from the early 1980s. No longer an Anglo-Irish outpost of beer, bangers and mash, Australia seen through wine-tinted glasses was a Mediterranean-like culture attuned to its climate and post-war, wine-drinking migrant communities.
The industry’s failure to galvanise around the “fine wine scene” – well-established by the early 1990s – is seen by critics like Croser as a form of commercial self-harm. Rather than chase quality, the industry chased volume; instead of nurturing the reputation of Australian wine, it debased that reputation in the pursuit of short-term profit. About 60 per cent of Australian wine leaves our shores in shipping containers, mostly as bulk in outsized rubber bladders. The average price of our exported wine is a lowly $3.72 a litre.
“From the 1990s, we had massive growth of the industry,” Croser says. “Not all of it for export – the domestic industry was growing as well. By the end of the 1990s, the inland areas of Australia had been over-planted with vines. There was competition between Orlando’s Jacob’s Creek, Casella’s Yellowtail, Hardys’ Nottage Hill, Koonunga Hill from Penfolds, and these companies were offering generous contracts to inland grape growers – they all wanted a share of this booming market. There was added fuel in the form of tax incentives. Big investors entered the market.
“By 2010, it was obvious that the inland areas had been way overplanted,” Croser says. “At the same time, budget brands had become the main image of Australian wine overseas – that image was now dominated by the inland areas, hot-climate wine, sold in supermarkets, produced on an industrial scale.” The suggestion that Australian wine was “industrial”, tricked-up, or fake had become an established
trope in international wine appreciation. “The image of industrial winemaking overshadowed the fine-wine industry, making it harder for Australian fine wine to be recognised on its own terms.”
There’s a touch of the Jedi Knight wielding his lightsaber against the dark side of the Force in Croser’s argument with the “inlanders”, as he calls them. Is it really so cut-and-dried?
The topography of the Australian wine industry is fiendishly complicated. The big companies that run the inland industry are, in some cases, the same companies that own, support and promote some of the country’s finest wines. House of Arras, the winner in 2020 of a Decanter gong for world’s best sparkling, was until recently in the Accolade fold; Grange Hermitage is a product of Penfolds, which is owned by
Treasury.
Croser’s abiding passion, he insists, is quality. But quantity, for the past quarter of a century, has ruled. “There are influential people in the industry who say that all Australian wine is fine wine,” he tells me. “The biggest challenge for Australian wine broadly is the negative and deteriorating image problem created by the behaviour and travails of the branded commodity [mass-produced budget] wine industry. We need to bridge the gap between the increasingly poor external perception of Australian wine and the realities of Australia’s vibrant fine-wine community as it exists in the 65 fine-wine regions of Australia, 24 of which are as cool or cooler than Bordeaux in France.”
Swish goes the lightsaber. Swish. Swish.
Next morning, I set out for the South Australian Riverland to view the “tragedy”, to use Croser’s word, or at least the “crisis” evoked by economist Kym Anderson. I’ve been invited to a seminar for grape growers struggling to make ends meet, organised by Riverland winemaker and entrepreneur Ashley Ratcliff. Leaving the manicured slopes of the Adelaide Hills, I head west from the Mount Lofty range into sheep country and scrub. Once in the flats, I’m on a ribbon of road leading past towns bearing traces of German settlement – Schubert Street, and a rivulet named after the Rhine until anti-German wartime sentiment forced a name-change to the French river Marne. Crossing the copper-coloured Murray by car ferry at Swan Reach, I drive to the regional hub of Berri, past an ocean of vines as the sky purples
and a distant storm sweeps across the hard-cut horizon.
The vineyards should be neat, bare and carefully pruned at this time of the year as they await the bud-burst of spring. And many are. But here and there I pass vines abandoned or neglected. I pull over and walk a row. Bunches of desiccated red wine grapes, like black petals, turn lightly in the northerly wind that shears across the flatland. A bitter harvest – 2024.
Size matters a great deal to the Riverland wine industry. A jolly yellow and blue online brochure boasts a 410,888-tonne wine grape crush in 2023, “accounting for 62 per cent of South Australia’s and 34 per cent of Australia’s annual crush”. But statistics also speak to the region’s despair. The Riverland grape crush for 2023 was the lowest in a decade. This year, it declined a further 5 per cent. It’s expected to
decline again next year. In the 12 months to April, about 120 hectares of Riverland vines were torn out as grape prices crashed or, in the bureaucratic phrasing of Wine Australia, showed “a significant downward shift”.
Ratcliff’s Ricca Terra label has established a reputation for quality and innovation in the Riverland. He has planted grape varieties such as arinto and souzao from Portugal, which he blends with southern Italian varieties including nero d’avola to create unlikely mixed marriages. For sure, he sees “a lot of pain in these parts”, he tells me. But he’s an entrepreneur, and when he looks to the future, as he habitually
does, any number of alternative agricultural pathways open up: olives, pistachios, pomegranates, to name a few. When not promoting these off-ramps for struggling grape growers, he’s working hard to prove a point: good wine can be made in the Riverland.
On the morning of Ratcliff’s seminar for grape growers who want out, I meet Martin Bailey, proud owner of a diminutive six-hectare Riverland block. Bailey is a rangy Kiwi who married a local girl, Judy Till, from a farming family. Her grandfather, Clem, worked what became known as Till Farm under the soldier-settlement scheme for veterans of the Great War. “It was just Mallee scrub in those days,” says Bailey “Everyone joined together to clear the land and build the homes. Clem Till planted fruit trees and vines for table grapes but in the 1990s, in the wine industry’s boom years, it was all ripped out and the whole block was transplanted with cabernet sauvignon.”
When the couple took over Till Farm in 2017, they were getting about $480 a tonne for their grapes. The price fell to $345 a few years ago, and plummeted to a desperate low of $125 last year. By their reckoning, they’ve earned $35,000 in the past two years from grapes and spent twice that amount watering, fertilising and harvesting the crop. “People are running away because they can’t make a living,”
Bailey tells me over a coffee outside the seminar room. “There are a lot of folk who’d like to be here this morning but aren’t.” He cuts a quick look over his shoulder. “They’re third- or fourth-generation grape growers. It’s shame that keeps them away.”
The region’s grape growers, about half of them “blockies” like Bailey, working soldier- settlement farmlets of 10 hectares or less, provide a contracted volume of grapes to a local cooperative, which sells them to the big producers. He has never been given any encouragement to improve the quality of his grapes, he tells me. “The contract stipulates that they will take all the grapes we can provide, but they don’t want too much MOG [matter other than grapes].” He doesn’t know where or in what form the
wine from his grapes makes its way overseas, but he suspects most ends up in casks.
The mayor of the Berri Barmera Riverland region, 33-year-old Ella Winnall, was raised on a soldier-settlement block much like Martin and Judy Bailey’s during the Millennium drought. Her parents got out of grapes towards the end of the drought, turned off the water, and pulled out the vines. She stayed on in the region. “Our community is quite reliant on the wine industry,” she tells me. “When the industry is
going through a rough time, we feel it across the whole community – some of our main-street businesses like retail can be hurting just as much.” She repeats a plucky phrase often heard in the Riverland – it’s the “engine room” of the wine export industry. “It’s not all we do here though, we have some incredible grape growers and winemakers who are at the forefront of sustainable winemaking and are producing
absolutely banging wines that stand up against anywhere else in Australia.” I push on down the road to Salena Estate winery, rising from the roadside a few kilometres south of Berri, close by a bend in the Murray River, to find the lights out and no one home but owner-manager Bob Franchitto. Salena, in its prime, was one of the nation’s top 20 wine producers, pumping out 15,000 tonnes a year of bulk, cask, and some premium wine. Franchitto has agreed to meet me six months after his family-owned company went into receivership, owing $25 million, with 5 million litres of unsold bulk wine in storage. The son of post-war migrants, Franchitto is clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair and the unflinching gaze of a realist. Rather than an exit strategy, he’s looking for a financial lifeline. “I still believe there’s a future here but it’s going to be a tough road ahead,” he says over coffee in the empty boardroom of a business that once employed 40 people, ran a cellar door – even a restaurant. “This has been our life. We built this from nothing. It’d be sad to see it go.”
He bought part of the land on which Salena sits in 1991 and he and his wife, Sylvia, planted vines over the next few years. The couple started out with one barrel to share with friends, followed by three the next year, and 30 the year after that. They launched Salena Estate in 1998 with 300 tonnes of mainly cabernet and shiraz. “All the demand was in red,” he says. “In hindsight, it would have been better to have a bit more white.”
Thanks to an organic certification covering half the property, he found an early market in Scandinavia, but it was the Chinese thirst for Aussie red that supersized the 185-hectare Salena Estate. “We first went to China in about 2000 with a few containers a year and then suddenly it started to take off, peaking with 4 million bottles a year. About 70 per cent of our product went to China … But then Scott Morrison poked the dragon and overnight that market was gone.” Franchitto believes the Riverland wine industry needs to shrink by at least 20 per cent to match diminished global demand. Asked to identify the industry’s biggest missteps, his response is to the point. “There was a plan to increase production to where we were a few years ago. We got there in a hell of a hurry. We got there 20 years ahead of time. It all happened too quickly.”
An hour’s drive north-west of Salena Estate, I pass through Cooltong – “lizard” in the local Aboriginal dialect – and head into irrigated grape and citrus-growing country, sliced into narrow soldier-settlement blocks facing the red desert: two regions to the immediate north list their official population as zero. It’s platter-flat country, though pretty today with a light dusting of apple-green leaf on the fruit trees and a haze of pale pink blossom over the almonds. I’m here to meet Jack Papageorgiou, a farmer who has been outspoken in his calls for financial assistance packages to help grape growers to either struggle on with dignity or get the hell out.
Where Martin and Judy Bailey are exploring exit options, and Bob Franchitto is pleading with the banks, Papageorgiou has come to feel “imprisoned” on the 30- hectare vineyard he’s worked since 1974. The returns from his vines are so poor, he tells me, he’s been forced to tap his wife Poppy’s superannuation to the tune of $150,000 just to keep going. Heavyset and softly spoken, dressed in baggy jeans and a zipped-up sweater, Papageorgiou invites me into the family home and pours fresh orange juice from his orchard. He’d sell the land if he could find a buyer, but the banks won’t readily finance vineyard sales. “As a grape grower, I’ve seen many challenges, but I just can’t accept the industry has fallen to such a low level,” he says, putting a hand to his furrowed brow. “For the past three years, we’ve been selling grapes below the cost of production. We can’t sustain that. It’s unacceptable.”
The farmlets in this bend of the Murray were opened up by the post-World War I soldier-settlement scheme that lured Clem Till to the Riverland. An irony not lost on Papageorgiou is that many of his neighbours are soldiering on, suffering silently. He has formed a club for grape growers who’ve lost confidence and purpose. Depression, he says, is rife in the Riverland. “You can see it in their eyes,” he tells me. “They’re wondering, ‘What’s the point?’ ”
While I was on the road in the Riverland, the industry released a One Grape & Wine Sector Plan report, acknowledging that the “sector” had been “pushed off course”. For the Australian wine industry to extract itself from the mess it is in, the report stressed the need for “collaborative efforts from all parties …” calling for a “cohesive national brand that unites the sector in promoting Australian wine”.
Already, though, it’s clear the wine industry in Tasmania – the industry’s cool-climate El Dorado – is keen to disassociate itself from Australian wine, while many premium winemakers see the inland with its agonies as an oversized chain dragging on their ambitions. A long, slow-ripening season benefits most table grape varieties, hence the race to the country’s southern fringes and its cool uplands. In hot regions, winemakers aiming for some degree of finesse are forced to pick early to maintain a palatable
balance of sugar, alcohol and acidity, with a consequent loss of flavour and fruit intensity. Quality sparkling wine from chardonnay and pinot noir – the mainstay of the Tasmanian wine industry – is almost by definition a creature of cooler climates. Grapes for quality bubbly are picked early and sweetened just before corkage with a dollop of sugar syrup: the “dosage”.
A half-hour’s drive north of Hobart at Tea Tree, in the Coal River Valley, I pull into the five-hectare vineyard of New Zealand-born and -educated Samantha Connew. The hills under thin spring sunshine are glowing green after weeks of heavy rain. By late February, these hills will bleach out and the sheep will turn dirty-grey. Connew invites me into a small, tidy picking shed, makes coffee and sets a welcoming gift of six speckly eggs from her home-raised chooks on the table.
For her Stargazer label, Connew grows a fruit salad of pinot noir, riesling, gamay, chardonnay, pinot blanc, gewürztraminer and pinot gris. Her approach is at once classical and unconventional, her wines a delight. She lives and works in a world far removed from the big-sky Riverland with its industrial-scale tank farms, its unwanted wine lakes, and its air of brittle desperation. Her talk is not of contraction but modest expansion: a few additional hectares under vine and a cellar door aimed at the 27 per cent of visitors to Tasmania who are keen to taste wine. She has never “pursued growth for growth’s sake”, she stresses. “Life can get complicated when you get into that growth cycle. But such is the demand for Tasmanian wine that I’d be stupid not to take advantage.”
Connew started working at Wirra Wirra winery in McLaren Vale more than two decades ago, reeling in the 2007 red winemaker of the year award at the International Wine Challenge. “As soon as we say our wine is not for everyone, everyone wants it,” she says. “It’s the whole scarcity thing.”
For the better part of a century, Tasmanians have been carping about their island state’s not infrequent omissions from the map of Australia. The flourishing Tasmania wine industry now actively disassociates itself from Australia: it is Tasmanian first and foremost. In Italy, the wine lists of the better restaurants are segmented into regions: Liguria, Tuscany, Alto Adige. Tasmanian wine lists are likely as not to feature Australian wine and, in a separate category, Tasmanian. The term “New-Mania” has been coined in Tasmanian wine marketing circles to express an affinity, viticulturally speaking, with New Zealand. Sheralee Davies, chief executive of Wine Tasmania, tells me: “We want people to consider Tasmanian wine in a global, more than an Australian, context, comparing it with other cool-climate international wine
regions, such as parts of New Zealand and the similar things it represents – cool climate, quality and elegance.”
There are fears, nevertheless, that the crisis of the mainland wine industry will be visited on Tasmania, that growth will diminish quality and big investors will come to dominate what has always been a small island industry. Some companies have had a long presence in Tasmania, such as Hill-Smith Family Estates with Jansz sparkling and Dalrymple, and Accolade with Bay of Fires and House of Arras – the latter label recently sold to a relative newcomer, Handpicked Wines. Though based in Victoria’s King Valley, Brown Brothers invested in Tasmania in 2010, with its Devil’s Corner label and vineyards in the Tamar Valley and on the east coast. Western Australia- based Fogarty Wine Group has been busily hoovering up Tasmanian land, vineyards and labels. Adelaide Hills company Bird in Hand recently followed suit with the purchase of a 180-hectare east-coast strip and a wedge of the Tamar Valley.
Overseas wine companies and private investors are joining the vine rush; the Champagne house of Mumm makes a Tasmanian sparkling, while the US-based Jackson Family Wines has reportedly signalled its interest in Tasmania.
Connew isn’t overly perturbed. Tasmania, in her view, is perfectly placed to resist the trap of gigantism and high-volume wine production. Its twisty, hilly landscape and isolation will likely continue to nurture the future of premium wine. Wine Tasmania predicts that by 2040, Tasmania’s wine sector will be the island economy’s highest contributor, producing about $2 billion in wine value annually. “Our annual crush is 1 per cent of the national total,” Connew says. “And it’s 6 per cent of the total value.
That in itself tells you something.”
Kym Anderson and Brian Croser agree we’re not going back to the old, low-end wine export industry, at least not its former scale. People are drinking less wine, less red wine, less cheap wine, less hot-climate wine. There is a deep awareness, too, of the fragility of waterways, particularly the Murray-Darling. Says The Australian Ark’s Caillard: “There will always be a fine-wine market. But the bulk-wine market is basically unsustainable. We cannot stay in the groove of being a commodity winemaker.”
At the same time, cool-climate premium vineyards don’t have a monopoly on the future of Australian wine. There will always be a place for decent wine that doesn’t break the bank. Croser, despite his decades-long argument with the inlanders, is full of praise for Ashley Ratcliff’s Ricca Terra label. So, too, is Sarah Burvill, winemaker at Bird in Hand, who over a wine tasting sings the praises of Ratcliff’s grapes and those of growers he’s worked with. “He’s really trying to elevate the quality of Riverland fruit, encouraging growers to give the crop a bit of extra attention, shift the thinking away from big volume, low price,” she tells me.
In late September, Ratcliff swept the field at the 2024 Riverland Wine Show, winning best single-vineyard wine with his Ricca Terra 2023 Soldiers’ Land Shiraz, a nod to good winemaking and a wink to the region’s century-old, soldier-settler heritage. I got word of Ratcliff’s success on the day the devastating spring frost descended on the Riverland. It will likely wipe out a quarter of the 2025 vintage, grinding the region’s already struggling growers deeper into the red Mallee soil. A week later, as this story was being prepared for publication, I learnt from Bob Franchitto that his pleas for a “financial lifeline” had been rejected, and he’d lost Salena. “My life’s work,” he said. “Gone.”
Medium-full red/brick-red colour; the bouquet is mellow, complex and loaded with charred roast-meat, dried mushroom and sousbois characters, earthy/dried-herb and leather nuances, traces of tobacco as well. The structure is firm and the tannins provide backbone and extend the length of the back-palate. Serious pinot noir, ageing gracefully.
This is a site not owned by Tapanappa but kindred to the motif of high quality vineyards within Tapanappa’s stable. This is beautiful and distinctly ‘syrah’ in its medium weight, silky tannins, huge perfume and gentle, savoury elements. It smells like red berries, cherry, port jelly, game meat, white pepper and leafy herbal things. The palate similar, juicy in a way, very pure of fruit character and tightening slowly on a ripple of lacy, talc-like tannin profile. A sweetness of spice lingers. Harmony is a great word here. Fantastic drinking.
95 Points
Tapanappa Foggy Hill Vineyard Fleurieu Peninsula Pinot Noir 2023 scores 95 points from Mike Bennie. “A fine-boned, texturally-structured and firm Pinot
Noir of dark cherry, raspberry and earthy undertones dashed with saltbush and spice. The grippy, minerally texture and fine sweep of elegant tannins create a beautifully balanced wine that delivers distinct sense of elegance in its understatement. Fine architecture here and overall, poise and charm.
Brian Croser: Australia went through a huge expansion through the 1990s to 2005. A lot of that expansion occurred in the inland, highly irrigated areas, with fruit that was destined for the grocery
stores as branded commodity wine—your Jacob’s Creek and the like. A lot of overplanting happened
then, and we’re now bearing the consequences of that. Like California, like Italy, like Bordeaux, like
Germany, I understand, we’re going to have to get rid of quite a lot of those branded commodity
vines—but that’s still not what we’re talking about.
For the whole of the past 20 years, that overrun of branded commodity wine has colored—jaundiced,
if you like—the fine-wine industry in Australia. We do have a vibrant, buoyant or semi-buoyant, fine-
wine industry here that’s been growing for the past decade at about 4% (combined export and
domestic). If you take out the American bubble of 2000 to 2008 and the Chinese bubble of 2011 to
2021, then underlying growth of premium wine in Australia is strong.
So, what’s happened in the premium wine sector? Well, we’ve made a major, major change in terms
of recognizing the role of the vineyard in fine wine. We’ve gone from having the fruit-salad vineyards
of the 1990s, where everything grew alongside everything else—Gewürztraminer alongside Merlot,
alongside Pinot. And we’ve recognized the regional specialities—that certain grape varieties are
suited to certain regions: Riesling and Semillon in Clare… Cabernet in Margaret River and
Coonawarra… Chardonnay in the Adelaide Hills, Yarra Valley, Mornington… Pinot in the same places,
and in Tasmania, of course. So, that recognition has been dramatic over the past two decades. At the
same time, there’s been a recognition of terroir, of the influence of place on wine quality, wine
uniqueness, wine style.
Our good friend [WFW contributing editor] Andrew Jefford has been very important in that. He came
out in 2008, when the debate was: “Is terroir really a construction of the French, and an affectation, or
is it a real thing?” The Australian fine-wine industry would now accept that terroir is a real thing, and
that fine wine is a reflection of the place where it’s grown. And then refining that one step further—not
all sites within a region are created equal. There are some distinguished sub-regions and
distinguished sites that grow the regional grape varieties better than other vineyards sites. The idea of
the distinguished site has been accepted, and everybody, I think, in the fine-wine industry, is now
working to make sure that the site is right, then refining what they’re doing on that site to get the best
possible result out of it.
Viticulture as manicure
Brian Croser: At the beginning of these 20 years, we were a fairly agricultural industry. A lot of the
technology was developed for vineyards in the inland areas, the highly irrigated, high-productivity
vineyards, and applied in other regions. Now there is much more focus on how the vineyard is set up:
closer spacing, the orientation of the rows, the height of canopy, and, of course, the clonal material
used, the rootstock material used. There is just much more fastidious viticulture across the whole of
the fine-wine sector in Australia.
We are really emulating what’s been happening on the west coast of America, to a lesser extent
in New Zealand, and certainly in the Old World—almost down to manicuring each vine according to its
special requirements. When I planted Foggy Hill [in 2003], I’d already been in a war of words with the
Coonawarra region—in particular, on broad spacing, big vines, lots of fertilization, lots of irrigation, big
equipment, mechanical pruning, mechanical picking… as all of that was causing mediocre results. At
our vineyards in Coonawarra [at Petaluma], we’d set up much closer spacing, as we did with our
vineyards in the Piccadilly Valley in the Adelaide Hills. And having had experience with those closer
spaced vineyards in Oregon, I was very pleased with the success. So, I decided that at Foggy Hill,
that was the way we needed to go. I had been looking at that site for a couple of decades and not
telling anybody (including my wife, because that meant we were going to spend some money on more
vineyards). And then when the takeover of Petaluma occurred in 2001, I had the opportunity to buy
the farm with the site.
In my mind, I pictured we were going to make La Tâche 5 miles (8km) from the great Southern
Ocean, because it had exactly the right sort of day-night temperature differential, the right heat
summation, the right humidity. And of course, we didn’t make La Tâche. But we have made a very
special Pinot out of that site by implementing the vineyard in the right way. Raymond Bernard from
Dijon actually visited the site in 2004, and walked down the vineyard and said, “This is a good home
for my babies.” And so we have those clones, his Pinot clones, on rootstock, close-spaced and very
close to the ground—and that sort of viticulture was pretty much unknown in Australia in 2003. Now,
in 2024, there are vineyards in almost all the quality areas that would reflect those same priorities.
Minor for the lifetime of a vineyard; a catastrophe for the globe
Brian Croser: From the 1980s on, I started thinking about and talking about climate change, and how
we had moved at least one degree from industrial times by the time I planted Foggy Hill. In the grand
scheme of things, that’s not so important for our vineyard—that’s going to be in the ground for 40
years. The climate, the movement of the temperature, is relatively minor, even though it’s a major
catastrophe for the globe.
And it’s relatively minor, in terms of the vineyard, compared to the climate cycles that we go through.
We have three climate drivers down here in Australia. We have the ENSO [El Niño Southern
Oscillation], out of the Pacific. We have the Indian Ocean dipole out of the Indian Ocean, up near
Broome. And we have what’s called SAM, the Southern Annular Modulation, which crosses the Great
Southern Ocean between us and the Antarctic—that’s the thing that influences our weather most, and
my mind was very firmly on SAM as an influencer of this vineyard site. And all in a positive sense,
because SAM brings cool air from the Antarctic up onto the coast.
So, I wasn’t thinking about climate change as having an effect in my lifetime on that vineyard. I was
thinking about climate change having an effect in my children’s and my grandchildren’s lifetimes. I’m
very much more focused on vintage variation. There are 212 days in the growing season—from
October 1, to April 30—and a shift of 1°C [1.8°F] in the weather of that growing season produces a
shift of 212°C [382°F] in the heat summation. So, for example, in the Piccadilly Valley, if it’s 1,175
degree days centigrade, if it goes up by one degree centigrade for every day of those 212 days, then
we’re at 1,580 degree days centigrade—and we had that in 2016 and 2018. But if it goes down by
one degree, then we go down to 900—which we had in 2011. And then there are a lot of vintages that
fit in between those two extremes. But even in the coldest and the hottest years, the vineyards have
still stayed true to their terroir—they produced wines that are recognizably Tiers Chardonnay,
recognizably Foggy Hill Pinot, recognizably Whale Bone Cabernet/Merlot. So, I’m somewhat consoled
in the timeframe that I’m involved. I don’t think I can say that in my lifetime I’ve seen a dramatic
change because of climate change—in wine style or wine quality or wine composition. But I have
seen dramatic change with the weather cycles.
No substitute for living in the vineyard
Brian Croser: Throughout my winemaking viticultural life, from the early ’70s onward, the vineyard has
been my focus, and I’ve developed all sorts of methodologies for being able to sample vineyards
properly. But there is no substitute for living in a vineyard, or for the length of time that you live in your
vineyard—the accumulation of experience, the empirical observation. You can tell when vines are
going to be thirsty. You can tell when they’ve got too much water. You can tell when they’re looking
tired from lack of nutrients. You can become very, very attuned to what you’re observing, and to what
you’re seeing on the ground, too… cracks in the ground, grass drying off.
My viticulture has changed to become more minimalist. We definitely don’t use Roundup [herbicide]
anymore. We do use a knockdown herbicide. We don’t use anything other than copper and sulfur in
the vineyard. But I haven’t gone organic, and I certainly haven’t gone biodynamic.
I think there is a division in our industry—which is fine, it’s a lovely, intellectual division—between the
spiritual and the scientific. We’re definitely on the scientific side, but not as rigorously on the scientific
side as my good friends, the Cazes family of Lynch-Bages, where they collect mountains of data
about every little subsection of their vineyard. I don’t feel the necessity to do that, because my
vineyards are smaller and I’m intimately in them every day of the growing season, so data doesn’t
drive what we do. It’s very much based on observation and experience of what’s happened in the past, and trying to extrapolate that to the present and future. But there are many examples of
recognition technology and artificial intelligence, and data can provide answers for much bigger areas
of vines, and much more complex situations, than ours. Penfolds would be a great example of
that—they are using all that sort of stuff to the nth degree.
The spiritual and the orthodox
Brian Croser: There is a bit of a revolution going on in fine wine around the world. I think part of it is
that almost nobody can afford the best of the “orthodox” products—the La Tâches and the Latours.
So, there is a movement to look for alternatives, for alternative grape varieties and alternative ways of
growing and dealing with them.
Biodynamics is applied to the orthodox as well, of course—it’s big in Burgundy and it’s big in Bordeaux. It’s a spiritual thing, more ideological than scientific. But because of the restrictions that it imposes on the management of the vineyard, you end up with a product that is high-quality—maybe higher in quality than from conventionally run vineyards.
I believe it can be matched by the best scientific approach on the other side of the coin. But biodynamic connects with consumers, as does organic—the sort of more spiritual, more ideological approach to things. My methods are very similar, but we would never make a claim that they’re the same order. And there are some very bad outcomes with biodynamics and organic in bad seasons. I remember the winemaker at Palmer telling me that in 2018 (I think it was) they lost half their crop to mildew because of the application of biodynamics. There is a rejection of science that becomes evil; that is absolutely not true. But I don’t think biodynamics necessarily crosses that line. I think it’s much more benign than that. I think it can live pretty comfortably with science.
It feels Grinchish, but I’d rather drink the 1.5m Chardonnay now. That’s because, as this vertical showed, Tiers needs a good five years to show its best, not one. Especially from a vintage that was cool (1093C vs the average of 1135C measuring the Heat Degree Days scale) and a harvest that was late. I have no doubt that this wine will be the better wine in time.
Still, this smells great – white peach, vanilla bean, and some fresh wood. There’s this delightful white peachy flourish that is generous, juicy, and primal. It is probably too primal – the grapefruit acidity juts out, and there is a freshly sawn log new oak smell, too. But it’s all present and correct. That resounding creamed nectarine flavour is intense and it’s going to work. Greatness of elements, pulling together (but not yet). Buy with absolute confidence.
Best drinking: 2026 at least. 18.5/20, 94/100+. 12.9%, $110. Tapanappa website. Would I buy it? I still would yes.
The close-planted 1.5m block on the Tiers vineyard is now twenty years old and is clearly hitting its straps. In the early days, an element was missing in the spotty-labelled 1.5m Chardonnay wines that reminds us what vine age does to concentration and complexity. But now? Things are different.
Green gold colours are unmistakeably ‘Tiers’ in character. It’s youthful, with a vanilla banana lift over a palate of fig, nuts, peach, nectarine and even a little golden honey. It’s linear, in a medium-bodied way, but still subtly powerful in its way – refined, never hard, just the right amount of modern whipped butter winemaking and white fruits and a pristine palate. It is way too young but rather perfect in its crisp starched linen and white nectarine mode, and ultimately so drinkable. So drinkable. I had to stop myself from emptying my glass; it was so perfect. Excellent wine.
Best drinking: already great. 18.7/20, 95/100. 12.5%, $90. Tapanappa website. Would I buy it? Yes.
There is a big jump in RRP for this entree to the Tapanappa Chardonnay range, but when crops are low and demand is high, it makes a lot of sense. This Piccadilly Chardonnay comes from ‘Pat and Ted’s Vineyard on Mount Bonython’, which I don’t know much about as a vineyard source, but it clearly works.
As ever with BrIan’s Chardonnay releases, this feels like proper Chardonnay, not some Sauv imitation, with a distinct mealy white peach grapefruit mouthwatering, rich/freshness that feels very right. There’s less oak influence in this wine (it spent less than six months in barrel) and more about that pure Piccadilly flavour and a contrast of flavours. There’s a line of solidsy whipped and filigreed white peach/fig ripeness, before a pure finish. It’s perhaps not in the same complexity class as the two Tiers wines, but a classy wine.
Best drinking: good now, better next year. 17.7/20, 93/100. 12.5%, $60. Tapanappa website. Would I buy it? I’d probably wait and shell out for the wine below.
Pale crimson in the glass, the swill itself deft, dignified. This poise, together with tight bright fruit, leads the trajectory for this remarkable wine from the cool and late ripening ’23 vintage. The wine is well-lit and the bouquet carries noteworthy lift. Red cherry, plum and Christmas berries scatter throughout. Umami undertones, too, leaf litter, bresaola and turned earth. There is no negotiation between structure and fruit here, just supreme balance. The tannins are authoritative yet joyous, lending frame through an enduring, savoury-leaning finish with plenty of spice, Szechuan, clove and anise. If quiet elegance were a wine, this would be the embodiment.
At the highest point of the Fleurieu Peninsula, half-way between Victor Harbour and Cape Jervis, lies the Foggy Hill Vineyard. Its Pinot Noir is quite exceptional from year to year. Even in very cool years like 2023, the vineyard produces a Pinot of note. The ‘23 reflects the vintage in both its lifted florals, its delicacy and sinewy tannin structure. Bright cherry and raspberry scents with lifted rose petal, pomegranate and blood orange. Bright and flush in cranberry and cherry-berry fruit flavour, the cooler vintage shows through with a finely structured Pinot, gentle, firm in tannin presence and fine featured on the palate. It’s a wine to watch and wait and enjoy, with more time in the bottle recommended. The winemaker, Brian Croser, believes that distinguished vineyards like Foggy Hill are defined by the ability of their wines to age. He expects the ’23 to shine around six years and “beyond.” Good advice.
2023 was a cooler vintage than some on the Fleurieu Peninsula, indeed the coolest of four such years for the Foggy Hill vineyard. The cooler year led the team to forego any whole bunches in the ferment. The wine spent eight months maturing in barriques, one third new, before bottling. Winemaker Brian Croser has described this as a typical expression of the unique Foggy Hill terroir. Personally, I thought this stood up and was at least as impressive, if not more so, than any of this line I have seen. 1,300 six-packs made. Bright crimson in colour, there are notes of truffles, animal hides, forest floor, and a mix of cranberries and raspberries. There is complexity already apparent here and good intensity, though it remains, at all times, immaculately balanced. A silky texture and yet it also walks the tightrope to offer that intensity with fine, sleek, slippery tannins and impressive length. The line of acidity which runs the full journey ensures the wine has good energy. Drink any time from now for the next six to eight years, although probably considerably longer given the evidence provided by its sibling. Love this.
This was an exceptionally cool vintage. Despite that, the colour is light but with a glowing intensity and vibrancy. The nose reveals that distinctive spicy character with savoury and slightly limestone-like characters. The palate is still tightly coiled with fine tannins and a chalky controlling acidity defining through to the long finish. Light-bodied, yes, but there is power and poise here that will support cellaring.
Sometimes, the early sell out of a wine is actually good news for drinkers. Take the Definitis ’21 Pinot Noir which quickly sold out leaving the door open for Tapanappa owner/ winemaker, Brian Croser, to dig deep into the cellar and re-release the 2018 Definitus. You’ve got to be happy with that. What a wine! So youthful, combining a brightness of personality with something extra – complexity, texture and a touch of savouriness that brings an added depth of flavour. Black cherry, plum, earth, forest floor and aniseed aromas. Displays an obvious rich, ripeness of flavour that comes from a warm vintage. It’s reflected in the overall texture and charm of the wine as it eases into a middle palate and layers of sweet, dark fruits, spice, earth, dried herbs, potting soil and undergrowth. Fine tannins play a part in this wine’s charm offensive. Definitus 2018 acts as an important reminder – if one was needed – that quality Australian Pinot Noir can age an absolute treat.
The 2021 vintage of Definitus sold out so quickly that the team decided to release a little of their museum stocks of the 2018 alongside the 2023 Foggy Hill. Given only 430 dozen were made in the first place, you can understand how limited this is. This provides pinotphiles with a wonderful opportunity to compare and contrast the two wines – 2023 a cool year while 2018 was a warm one; one newly released and the other with some serious bottle age; 2023 with no whole bunches included, while the 2018 had 15%; and the Definitus from a special patch in the vineyard. Those less interested in comparing and contrasting can simply just enjoy the wines. The museum release was nearly twice the price of the new release, so does that mean twice the quality? Pinot is a funny thing. Both wines had much to offer and your preference is likely to be whether you enjoy the elegant, refined cooler style or the richer and bolder older option. A crimson/garnet hue, the wine does have the advantage of some years of development. We have appealing truffle notes, red fruits, aniseed, fungal touches, forest floor, dry herbs and a flick of cinnamon. Very much a savoury style with fine, sleek tannins, excellent balance, good intensity and serious length. This still has ten years ahead of it.
This is a re-release of this wine from the excellent 2018 vintage. This was the second release of this wine which comes from a special and defined part of the vineyard. It’s an immensely powerful no-holds-barred Pinot loaded with blue and black fruits and coated with a fine dusting of spices. The palate has the faintest hint of leathery development but it’s offset by the still primary fruit characters. Everything points to a great wine in the offing.
This multi-layered 2018 Pinot Noir is in excellent condition at 6 years of age as it radiates with cherry pit, and dark earth are topped by gamey, spicy aged tones. Vibrant and energetic with ample gravel /iron stone with a strong Burgundian feel and a touch of green herbs and well matched by significant tannins support a long and sustained, but still slightly closed finish. A standout vintage for this label if not the best yet.
One whiff and this Tapanappa Foggy Hill showcases its pinosity. From a cooler, low cropping year, give it some time to show its best.
Let it breathe to witness red berries, briar, black tea, tilled earth, compost and cola gradually unfurl. More savoury than fruit-driven, I felt it seemed reluctant to go a little deeper, and as a result, it was holding itself back. On the second and third day of tasting, the red fruit that sits at the core started to shine. An array of super fine spices wrap around a finish that just hangs. Give it some time and it should continue to develop in the years to come.
Drink to ten years+
Youthful purple in the glass, vivid and bright. Evocative and lifted aromas of blueberry, dried herbs, sarsaparilla, nutmeg, violets and Asian spice. Fleshy, blue fruit driven, textured and mouth-filling. There’s a very pure drive of fragrant, opulent and bright fruit along with granular tannins and bright acidity. There’s real vibrancy and life to this syrah.
95 Points
The fourth consecutive cool vintage, and the coolest of the last four too. I have a weather station in my back yard, and I like to look at the data, and in this way, I feel a sort of kinship with Brian Croser, who loves weather statistics as much as I do. You can look at the the weather at my house for the month of August HERE. Ha ha. It’s been unusually hot. Picked on the 18th of April. One third new oak.
I said it of last year’s release, and I’ll say it again. This wine has a certain steely top note, or ozone maybe, strawberry and exotic spice, and some white chocolate and raspberry. It’s medium-bodied, with something of a leafy autumnal character, cool acidity, poached strawberry and spice, some hazelnut, a grilled red capsicum thing, with light grainy tannin closing out a finish of excellent length. It’s a really good wine.
Merlot (55%) and Cabernet Franc (45%) blend with fruit grown on the 37 million year old soils of the 45 year old Tapanappa Whalebone vineyard. Bottled under cork. 2019 was warm and dry and only recevied 72% of ‘normal’ growing season rainfall. Cool weather late saw hand harvesting at the usual time of late march for the Merlot and April 1st for the Cab Franc. Winemaker is the esteemed Brian Croser.
Medium deep garnet to ruby. Blackberry and dust, boysenberry swirl, dried mint, concentrated cassis, purple florals, cedary oak and obsidian mineral/earthiness. Goodness me, full flesh bound tight with meshy hyper fine savoury tannin. There’s a tomato sugo like spiced flow, topped with graphite-pencilly line and studded with umami. There’s black fruit, there’s earth. There’s elegance and seriousness. There’s class and depth. It’s nearly all there. Something to savour and ponder over now, or put it away for decades.
95 Points
Cabernet Sauvignon (85%), Shiraz (15%) fruit grown on the 37 million year old soils of the Tapanappa Whalebone vineyard. Bottled under cork. 2019 was warm and dry, and ‘meagre’ harvest of 2.5 tonnes per hectare due to poor fruit set in late spring. Winemaker is the esteemed Brian Croser.
Fragrant violets and earth with cedar, dried mint, blackberry fruit strap, pencil graphite, plum sauce, salt crystals, anise spice and some inky umami. Medium fleshed with length and complex layering, like the earth it comes from. Stays fresh through the tail while being ably supported by drying, savoury, fine tannin. Has all the structure and hallmarks for long-term ageing.
94 Points
Medium depth of ruby to brick-red hue, the bouquet scented with pot-pourri and sandalwood, a hint of tapenade or olive paste, while the palate is full bodied and quite firm, with lashings of grippy tannins that would appreciate hearty protein at the dinner table. Interestingly, the bouquet and flavours are mellowing nicely while the tannins remain quite assertive.
92 Points
Good depth and hue of colour, holding its age well, the bouquet suggesting camphor, green leaves, a hint of eucalyptus, and crushed peppercorns, while the palate is very firm and grippy, needing a hearty piece of steak to combat the firmness. A dab of fruit sweetness in the middle leavens the structure. Full bodied red worthwhile cellaring.
2024–2039
Foggy Hill is Brian Croser’s latest (albeit one twenty years in the making) passion project, down on the Southern tip of the Fleurieu.
Cool, maritime influenced, the site for this stunningly consistent Pinot.
Leads with a floral, rose-raspberry mix over Sage. Spice – pepper and Chinese five spice – linger in the background, supplementing the initial brighter aromatics with added depth.
The palate is deep, rich – with a balance of tight and fine tannins, with a freshening acidity in the mix. Finishes long, with an appealing mineral like pucker. Offers finesse, elegance, yet without sacrificing depth of flavour – there’s longevity here for sure, if you can keep your mitts off that is.
94 Points
Lovely figgy note gently wafting from the glass here. Add to that ripe stonefruit, pear – it’s like a summer salad in a glass.
Bracing acidity running the full length of the wine. Citrus, stonefruit – a herbal/ floral note in the mix that I can’t quite put a finger on as to its specificity. This is a quite stunning release.
95 Points
Melon, a harder edge of Stonefruit kernel, fig and spice.
Initial entry is gentle and textural, leading to an expansive mid-palate through the finish. Burst of energetic tangy-lime acidity closes the wine out.
It’s cool year credentials and moderate 12.5% acidity self-evident in an excellent package.
93 Points
Impressively fresh, perfectly ripe blackcurrant and dark berry aromas are supported by high quality oak. The long palate offers fine, silky tannins. Enjoyable drinking, but will reward cellaring.
4.5 stars
The nose is complex and intriguing, more secondary than primary, showing hints of tobacco leaf. A very finely structured, lengthy, savoury palate sets the seal on the excellence of this wine. If you love the wines of Bordeaux, you’ll understand.
5 stars
From a close-planted, lower-to-ground trellised plot in the Tiers Vineyard, Piccadilly, Adelaide Hills. An intense wine, concentrated and surprisingly rich given the season. Scents of salted cashew, ripe apple, ginger, clove, fennel and green mango, the palate an echo of the aromas set to medium weight with more woody spices apparent and a course of briny minerality slipping through. Glossy in texture up front, the wine rolls long onto a spicy, limey and salted-nut finish with just the faintest, pleasing lift of white balsamic zing. It feels serious, contemplative and very good, all up. Its best years will come with cellaring, too.
95 Points
This pure-fruited wine needs time to show its best. It tastes of pear, flint, peach and riverstones, with hay, lemon and cedarwood about the edges. It shows both power and control, but for the moment, it seems backward and a little surly. It will flourish in time.
94 Points
From the Tiers Vineyard planted in 1979. A third of the barrels used are new French oak. The cooler year renders a wine of tension and torsion, precision and finesse. It’s heavily perfumed, an invitation to drink lustily, with green apple, lime, ginger, cinnamon and faint alpine herb characters lightly dusted with clove-cedar oak. Just so. The palate has immense vitality and length, a pleasing, almost lightly hazy texture captured in ripples of briny acidity holding in more apple, cinnamon, clove and licks of peach and green almond. Lots going on here; an immensely satisfying and serious wine. And delicious, importantly.
96 Points
Lovely figgy note gently wafting from the glass here. Add to that ripe stonefruit, pear – it’s like a summer salad in a glass.
Bracing acidity running the full length of the wine. Citrus, stonefruit – a herbal/ floral note in the mix that I can’t quite put a finger on as to its specificity. This is a quite stunning release.
95 Points
This expressive and lively 2021 Mount Barker Shiraz is delightfully savoury with its reservedd layers of new leather and dark earth over a core of mulberry and blackberry, punctuated by fine French oak. Good precision and tension and, while a little reserved, retains composure over an extended finish with support by firm yet firm al-dente tannins.
An Australian Syrah that actually lives up to the name, with a heart of bright spice, bursting in aromatic red and black berries and boasting a lightness of touch. How is this possible in a wine that is 14.9% alcohol? Well, for that answer look no further than the experienced hand of winemaker, Brian Croser, and his co-winemaker, Michael Symons. In 1992, the Symons family planted Syrah at Mount Barker because of its similarity to the soils of the Northern Rhône. For decades, the fruit was sold to Petaluma, but more recently small parcels were made available to Tapanappa. This is, according to Croser, a Distinguished Site, that is, it is super special. Arousing lifted scents of briar, bramble, wild black fruits, blueberry, earth, anise and spice. So on point in capturing a cool climate, aromatic, medium-bodied Syrah (aka Shiraz) that moves with energy and life bringing fruit and spice to the fore. Sage, pepper, allspice, anise and a light floral injection sit comfortably amid the blackberry, red plums and supple texture afforded by maturation in seasoned barriques. Warm in generosity off a terrific vintage year, flows easily, flows long. More please!
A warm and dry vintage for the region in 2019, which helped ensure that the Whalebone Vineyard, planted 45 years ago, had a very small yield. The wine is a blend of 85% Cabernet and 15% Shiraz. The Shiraz comes from the Crayères Vineyard. After destemming, the two varieties were fermented separately, after cold soaking. A week’s maceration on skins followed. Malolactic fermentation was in French oak barriques, half new and half single use, before seventeen months of maturation. 670 dozen under cork. Deep maroon in colour, the nose gives aromas of black fruits, warm earth, cigar box notes, tobacco leaves and toasty oak. There are hints of vanilla, nutmeg, chocolate, dried herbs and cassis. Showing good length and fine tannins, this is an attractive style for drinking over the best part of the next decade.
Everything about this wine suggests it is one for the long haul. Both the Merlot and Cabernet Franc come from the Whalebone Vineyard. The blend is 55% Merlot and 45% Cab Franc with blending only just before a seventeen month maturation period in barriques. After destemming and a short cold soak, an eleven day ferment and then seven days on skins. 470 dozen, under cork. This is deep red. The toasty oak is to the fore here. Notes of chocolate, black fruits, coffee grinds, dried herbs and plums, the wine has serious concentration, but impeccable balance. Poise, focus, very fine if slightly firm tannins and excellent length. Definitely one for the cellar.
90 Points
Complex and stylish, the gorgeously expressed bouquet shows dark berry, charcuterie, porcini
and toasted nut aromas, leading to a concentrated palate offering plush texture backed by layers
of fine, grainy tannins. Multi-layered and firmly structured, this is sensually satisfying with a
persistent, engaging finish.
At its best: now to 2030.
This is a stunning Australian nod to the wines of St Emilion on Bordeaux’s right bank, a compelling blend of two red grape varieties that often take a back seat but shine here with waves of flavours gently cascading onto your tongue in a very stylish way. This is a masterclass in balance with the 55% merlot and 45% cabernet franc from Wrattonbully in South Australia spending almost 18 months in French oak (50% new) adding to the palate interest but never intruding. There is dark layered fruit here from a warm vintage, along with savoury and earthy nuances, herbal interludes, dark olive notes and some spice hints. This is at its best when paired with food. We paired it with roast lamb en croute, which worked a treat. $90. But worth it. Excellent drinking.
95 points from me.
Tapanappa Adelaide Hills B&V Vineyard Syrah 2021, $60.
Confusingly, this new, limited-edition model from the Croser stable is from Mount Barker SA, not the more common Mt Barker WA. Regardless it’s amazingly fragrant and exceptionally easy to drink despite its nearly 15 per cent.
9.5/10
Tapanappa Whalebone Vineyard (Wrattonbully) Merlot Cabernet Franc, 2019, $90.
This is about as fashionable as merlot gets, however, just because you have money, doesn’t mean you have taste, in which case buy this to cover it up. Scrumptious red wine for the rich and fashionable.
9.5/10
Tapanappa Piccadilly Valley Tiers Vineyard (Alt. 450m) Chardonnay 2023, $110.
About as much going on as a chardonnay can provide and all of it good. Somewhat lighter than exxy chardonnays are renowned, and better for it. Alas, few will discover what chardonnay can be, and true, it is merely different in the end and depends what you prefer, but it’s hard to go back.
9.7/10
Absolutely brilliant. A captivating and detailed wine with veneers of interest peeling back with ease, give this Tapanappa Whalebone Vineyard Merlot Cabernet Franc some time and you’ll be rewarded. Three days of tasting certainly highlighted that.
From the last hot vintage of the previous 15 years (2005-2019), a meagre 3 tonnes of fruit was harvested per hectare due to poor fruit set. The Cabernet Franc was harvested on 1 April with the Merlot coming in at the normal time on 20 March.
The finished wine saw 50% new French oak for 17 months with the final blend of Merlot and Cabernet Franc at 55/45.
Layers of interest seem never ending. Think dried figs, baked blueberries, plums, passata, tilled earth, wallet leather, bay leaf and twigs. A blackcurrant undertow is the common thread with a minty edge hitching a ride. Dried sage and thyme continue to offer much to peruse with bone broth and pan juices rushing late with fine beads of exotic spices lingering beautifully. Above all, its presence through the mouth is seamless. Like the Whalebone Vineyard Cabernet Shiraz, give this some time or a good decant to see it at its best. Superb drinking!
Drink to ten years+
96/100
The synergy and fusion captivate with this Tapanappa Whalebone Cabernet Shiraz. Joy and pleasure seep through every pore. A wine that evolved fabulously over three days of tasting, it’s one to tuck away, that’s for sure.
From the last hot vintage of the previous 15 years (2005-2019), a tiny 2.5 tonnes of fruit was harvested per hectare due to poor fruit set. The Cabernet was harvested on 9 April with the Shiraz from the adjacent Crayeres vineyard coming in on 20 March.
The finished wine saw 50% new French oak for 17 months with the final blend of Cabernet and Shiraz at 85/15.
Red currants, red berries, blueberries and blackberries skip from the glass. Over a few days, the aromas and flavour profile showcase wonderful density. Tomato paste and spiced roasted red capsicum add some savoury flare but the tension demonstrates that time will be its friend. Satsuma plums, cigar box and tar add further detail with some bitter orange rind on close. Let it breathe and you’ll be rewarded. Above all, it’s an excellent wine that will comfortably age beyond a decade.
Drink to 10 years+
95/100
A great Aussie classic blend meets a Goldilocks kind of vintage – not too hot, not too cold – and the result is one mighty delicious wine. Bounces in ripe fruit highlighting the beauty of both grapes in black plum, black berries, cherry, violets, oregano, baking spices and graphite. To taste it’s smooth, fine-edged and, typical to past vintages, it remains medium bodied, floral, warm and super inviting. Oak remains a quiet layer that binds, a masterclass in persuasive support for some superlative fruit. The two grapes blend and bind seamlessly, no great division of labour here to be seen. Tannins are relatively supple and have a role in providing structure while bending to the power of the fruit. Simply irresistible.
Question: do you plan to drink this Wrattonbully red soon? If yes, then some advice. It needs air – a lot of swishing of air in the glass or, better still, a decant – and then watch it open. While five years-old, this charming Merlot Cabernet Franc remains very young at heart and tight in structure. It has plans of its own and they involve a lengthy stay in bottle. Still, with some air, the tension lessens and there’s much to delight in. Aromas in plum, blueberry, black cherry, anise, sage, bay leaf, new leather. There’s a savouriness to the palate, a kind of jalapeño like-pepperiness and earthiness with black fruits, complimented by florals and spice. Quite an exotic touch. Tannins are firm and they’re there for a reason. So much here to take in, consider, enjoy, debate. Don’t you just love a wine that gets you thinking? So good on a number of levels. POSTSCRIPT: This was even better on day two!
This 2019 Cabernet Shiraz is quite a different beast from the Merlot Cabernet Franc from the same vintage showing more poise and finesse with red currant, cedar and earthy tones prominent. Again a strong heart of tannins is the key feature, and a firm drying finish. Young and tight rigth now with potential to improve in bottle.
This broody and densely packed 2019 Merlot Cabernet Franc is exceptional and offers up muscular aromas of meat stock, blackberry and graphite with a strong backbone of new French oak. That density continues on the palate with a firm tannic overall feel – a strong core of gravel, graphite and baked earth flavours tightly bound over an extremely long finish. A wine best left at least ten years to see its best.
Blend of merlot and cabernet franc. Some wines just put you at ease, from the outset. The volume of fruit here matched to the sure swagger of tannin speaks in no uncertain terms of the quality on offer. This is absolutly top echelon. Blackcurrant, bay leaves, cedarwood, beetroot and kirsch flavours drum captivatingly through the palate and on through the long, but highly structured, finish.
96 Points