The Tiers Vineyard is in the coolest, wettest location in South Australia: the Piccadilly Valley.
It is perfectly suited to Chardonnay, being a closely matched homo-clime of Burgundy, especially the southern end of the Côte de Beaune where the great Montrachets and Mersault Chardonnays are grown.
The soil of The Tiers Vineyard is unique in the Adelaide Hills; derived from the 1.6 billion-year-old basement rocks of the Barossa complex lifted to the surface by a fault at the edge of The Tiers Vineyard. The rest of the Piccadilly Valley has soils derived from the much younger, 700 to 800 million-year-old, Burra group.
The Tiers Vineyard tilts gently to the north and east in a sheltered valley surrounded by forest, forming a true ‘clos’ environment.
The aspect takes advantage of the waning autumn sun in the northern sky, extracting the last rays of ripening energy at the cool end of the harvest.
It is planted on an intensive vine regime and managed fastidiously by hand on a vine-by-vine basis. The Tiers vines are now over 40 years old — in perfect balance with their environment at the low crop level of five tonnes/hectare. The vines are slowly devigorating with age, as expected, and the grape quality is increasing minutely year by year.
The Croser family planted the first vines in The Tiers Vineyard in 1979, the first vineyard planted in the Adelaide Hills region in the 20th century.
The Tiers Vineyard is in the Piccadilly Valley, in the centre of the Adelaide Hills, and lies in the Eastern shadow of Mount Lofty. When Brian and Ann Croser took their young family to the Piccadilly Valley in 1978 to establish the Petaluma winery, they purchased the seven-hectare property they named The Tiers as their home and the site for a revolutionary Chardonnay vineyard.
The property was named The Tiers in recognition of the name the 1836 pioneers gave to the central Adelaide Hills as seen from the Adelaide plain — the original name for the Piccadilly Valley was The Tiers Valley. Three hectares of adjacent low-lying land was purchased for the establishment of the Petaluma winery.
| Altitude | 450m ASL |
| Latitude | 35º 00’S |
| Dominant influences | Altitude / Southern Ocean |
| Heat Summation | 1023°C days (Mount Lofty) |
| Daily range | 8.6°C |
| Humidity | @3pm-56% |
| Sunshine Hours | 1771 |
| Growing Season Rain | 337 mm |
| Dominant soil | Red-brown clay loam, duplex soil |
| Geology | 1.6 billion years-old Calc Silicate (Barossa Complex) |
| Homoclime | Puligny Montrachet |
| Favoured Variety | Chardonnay |
Chardonnay had only emerged as a noble variety in Australia in the 1970s and, to add a dimension to the Piccadilly Valley experiment, Tiers was one of the first Chardonnay Vineyards in South Australia as well as being the first vineyard in the Adelaide Hills.
Brian Croser identified the Piccadilly Valley as one of the best places in Australia to plant Chardonnay based on the cool climate requirement to elicit the best qualities of this early ripening variety.
The Croser family’s search for a perfect climate in which to grow Chardonnay was inspired by Brian and Ann’s experience of the emerging Californian ’boutique’ wineries in the early 1970s, typified by the Chardonnay wines of Freemark Abbey, Chalone, Robert Mondavi, Mayacamus, Hanzell and Spring Mountain among others.
The first planting of The Tiers Vineyard was with the Davis Chardonnay clone OF, a heat-treated version of the Davis clone 1, now known in Australia as the Gingin clone. Davis Chardonnay 1 was exported to Western Australia in 1954 by Professor Harold Olmo, Brian’s viticulture Professor at the University of California, Davis.
The second planting at The Tiers in 1980 was supposed to be OF clone, but the Australian Wine Research Institute has since typed it as an unknown clone – not related to the Davis imports or any other of the clones they examined. It may well have arrived from the eastern states in the rush of Chardonnay plantings of the early 1980s and may relate to some of the first introductions of Chardonnay to New South Wales in the early to mid-1800s. It is a unique clone!
More on that story later.
In 1979, The Tiers Vineyard was a radical vineyard by Australian standards, planted on a close spacing regime of 2.1 metres between rows and 1.5 metres between plants in the row (3175 vines/hectare) – at the time, the closest spaced vineyard on the Australian mainland. The vines are hand-pruned to two canes of eight buds and two replacement spurs of two buds, 20 buds/vine and 63,500 buds/hectare. As the vines have aged, their vigour has declined. Over 40 years, the number of buds per hectare has dropped from 90,000 to 63,500 even as grape quality has inexorably increased.
Foliage wires hold the vine canopy vertically, a further revolutionary aspect of The Tiers Vineyard design in 1979.
Traditionally, the Piccadilly Valley was considered too cool and wet for grapegrowing and The Tiers Vineyard design was viewed by onlookers as too expensive to establish and too costly to operate for an economic return.
This scepticism was at first justified when the first flowerings of the new Tiers Vineyard failed in both 1983 and 1984 because of what later proved to be unusually cold and windy conditions at flowering time in late November. Since then, failure of fruit set at flowering has been an infrequent event.
The key to unlocking the quality potential of The Tiers terroir is the 63,500 buds/hectare to achieve proper vine balance and control of vigour in the benign Piccadilly Valley environment. The close-row spacing allows buds to be dispersed along enough fruiting wire to create an open canopy and establish sufficient leaf area to fully ripen the 1.6 kilograms of fruit/vine, representing a crop level of five tonnes/hectare.
The Croser family’s commitment to the continued unique quality of the Chardonnay fruit from The Tiers Vineyard was demonstrated by the difficult decision to remove the original 1979 OF clone Chardonnay planting and to replant in 2003 with Dijon Chardonnay clones on rootstocks and even closer spacing of 4,444 vines/hectare.
The fruit from these younger vines is used to make Tapanappa Tiers 1.5m Chardonnay.
Typically, The Tiers Vineyard is hand harvested in the last week of March to the first week of April.
A normal analysis of Tiers Chardonnay grapes at harvest is:
The tiny bunches are selectively hand-harvested into 0.3 tonne slotted trays and put into the cold room at the Tapanappa winery at the bottom of the vineyard. After 24 hours in the cold room, the grapes at 2°C are tipped as whole fruit into the four tonne air-bag press.
The juice from the cold whole bunches is gently pressed into a tank with a small addition of sulphur dioxide. There are no enzymes or other additions made, before the partially clarified juice is gravitated to Vosges oak barriques, one third new, for fermentation in barrel. We add our own selected yeast to conduct the fermentation in the naturally cool conditions of the autumn. The fermentation takes place slowly over two to three months and, when complete, the barriques are topped and the wine is allowed to rest on lees until the summer.
In January the Chardonnay wine is clear racked off lees and bottled.
The typical in-bottle final analysis of Tiers Chardonnay is:
| Alcohol | 13.5% |
| pH | 3.1 |
| Acid | 7.5 gpl |
| SO2 | 120 ppm |
| Volatile Acid | 0.4 gpl |
“Tiers Chardonnay is a unique expression of a noble variety and a distinguished site vineyard.”
Cellar Door opens daily, 11am – 4pm
15 SPRING GULLY ROAD
PICCADILLY SA 5151
PHONE (08)7324 5301
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