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Tolpuddle has done much to raise awareness of the Australian island state as a still wine hub
One of the most successful wines to have been launched in the past 10 years is made from grapes that travel 30 hours from vineyard to winery, including an overnight ferry journey.
The Tolpuddle vineyard is in the Australian island state of Tasmania. Since 2011, it has been owned by cousins Martin Shaw and Michael Hill Smith, who ship the freshly picked grapes via Launceston and Melbourne to their winery in the hills above Adelaide in South Australia, about 1,300km away. Tolpuddle makes almost equal quantities of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.
In only its second vintage (2013), the Pinot Noir picked up three trophies in the 2015 International Wine Challenge (IWC), including Best Australian Red. In total, Tolpuddle wines have won 17 trophies in Australia and the UK. The 2020 Chardonnay alone won five awards at last year’s Royal Melbourne Wine Show.
There is every likelihood that Tolpuddle would also have picked up trophies in the Decanter World Wine Awards, a rival competition to the IWC also held in London, but Hill Smith, who is also Australia’s first Master of Wine, is co-chair of the Decanter awards so does not submit his own wines for scrutiny. It seems appropriate, however, that Tolpuddle wines should be judged in the UK, since they take their name from the Dorset village famous for its “martyrs”.
These were 19th-century labourers, dispatched to Tasmania as convicts for the crime of setting up an agricultural union.
Their leader George Loveless served some of his sentence working on a property on or very close to where the vineyard is located. The 23.7-hectare vineyard was originally planted in 1988 on a site selected by the late Tony Jordan for Domaine Chandon, the Australian sparkling wine outpost of Moët & Chandon. (Jordan had a record of scouting out sites for vines, having spent four years travelling round China in search of the perfect spots for LVMH to produce sparkling wines and still reds.)
Jordan planted the original vineyard along with wine producer Garry Crittenden of Mornington Peninsula, just south of Melbourne, and local landowners the Casimaty family. The idea was that, with it being virtually the closest bit of Australia to the South Pole, the cooler temperatures would provide suitably high-acid fruit for fizz.
At this stage Jordan was also shipping fruit for Domaine Chandon 3,370km across the Nullarbor desert from the cool, far south-west of Australia in order to keep his sparkling wine refreshing enough.
Australian wine producers are much less fettered by geography than their European counterparts. During the journey, either to Domaine Chandon or Shaw + Smith’s winery, the grapes have to be kept as cool and intact as possible so they don’t start to ferment.
This requires refrigerated trucks and picking the fruit in shallow crates so that the berries aren’t crushed by the weight of those above them. According to Hill Smith, Tolpuddle’s 30-hour journey virtually replicates what is common practice with grapes grown on their own estate, of keeping freshly picked grapes in a cool room before fermentation to maximise freshness.
There is every likelihood that Tolpuddle would also have picked up trophies in the Decanter World Wine Awards, a rival competition to the IWC also held in London, but Hill Smith, who is also Australia’s first Master of Wine, is co-chair of the Decanter awards so does not submit his own wines for scrutiny.
It seems appropriate, however, that Tolpuddle wines should be judged in the UK, since they take their name from the Dorset village famous for its “martyrs”.
These were 19th-century labourers, dispatched to Tasmania as convicts for the crime of setting up an agricultural union. Their leader George Loveless served some of his sentence working on a property on or very close to where the vineyard is located. The 23.7-hectare vineyard was originally planted in 1988 on a site selected by the late Tony Jordan for Domaine Chandon, the Australian sparkling wine outpost of Moët & Chandon.
(Jordan had a record of scouting out sites for vines, having spent four years travelling round China in search of the perfect spots for LVMH to produce sparkling wines and still reds.) Jordan planted the original vineyard along with wine producer Garry Crittenden of Mornington Peninsula, just south of Melbourne, and local landowners the Casimaty family.
The idea was that, with it being virtually the closest bit of Australia to the South Pole, the cooler temperatures would provide suitably high-acid fruit for fizz.
At this stage Jordan was also shipping fruit for Domaine Chandon 3,370km across the Nullarbor desert from the cool, far south-west of Australia in order to keep his sparkling wine refreshing enough. Australian wine producers are much less fettered by geography than their European counterparts.
During the journey, either to Domaine Chandon or Shaw + Smith’s winery, the grapes have to be kept as cool and intact as possible so they don’t start to ferment. This requires refrigerated trucks and picking the fruit in shallow crates so that the berries aren’t crushed by the weight of those above them.
According to Hill Smith, Tolpuddle’s 30-hour journey virtually replicates what is common practice with grapes grown on their own estate, of keeping freshly picked grapes in a cool room before fermentation to maximise freshness.
Since acquiring the Tolpuddle vineyard, Hill Smith and Shaw have tweaked it considerably, pulling out clones that were specifically designed for sparkling wines and substituting mainly Burgundian ones, improving pruning techniques, building a dam to ward off frost and buying a further six hectares of neighbouring land.
They never intended to buy land in Tasmania until they set off on a road trip through the island in 2011. At that time, Australia’s top winemakers were desperately looking for cool-climate vineyards, and the potential of Tasmania was just beginning to be appreciated by producers, if not yet by consumers. Some of the grapes from Tolpuddle vineyard were bought by Hardys for the blend of its flagship Eileen Hardy Chardonnay, for instance, and another big company was paying A$7,000 a ton, twice the going rate, for the fruit from one of the vineyard’s blocks of Pinot Noir.
On their road trip, the cousins asked a young local winemaker Peter Dredge to organise a tasting of the best Tasmanian wines and found that “all the Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays we loved came from Tolpuddle”, recalls Hill Smith. “So, some time later, we had an overdraft, no idea who would manage the property, nor where the wine would be made, but Martin, who is not given to spontaneity in any form, was amazingly set on it.” They can’t have regretted their purchase. Tolpuddle has done much to raise awareness of Tasmania as a still wine region.
Extraordinarily, the first vines to be planted in any quantity on the island were the late-ripening Cabernet Sauvignon. When global warming really sets in, then presumably this will eventually be substituted for the much earlier-ripening Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that dominate the island’s vineyards today. For now, Domaine A, which is under new ownership, is the only Tasmanian winery to have shown consistent mastery of Cabernet, the most famous red wine grape of Bordeaux.
The current buzz here is making Tasmania’s answer to super-fashionable — and ever less affordable — red and white burgundy. Wine-minded climatologists like to compare “degree days” during the grape-growing season, when heat rises above a certain base temperature for growing. Tolpuddle, which is in the Coal River Valley, notches up an average of just 1,180 and the widely accepted minimum of 500mm of rain a year, while the averages for Dijon in Burgundy are 1,319 and 775mm respectively. Tasmania is being planted apace with vines but it’s still tiny compared with the rest of Australia’s wine regions, representing less than 1 per cent of national production.
As Hill Smith observed when presenting Tolpuddle’s first 10 vintages to a roomful of sommeliers at Trivet restaurant in London last month, “You will spill more wine in a year than Tasmania produces.” The wines were truly exciting and, at about £65 or $70 a bottle retail for the latest vintages, 2020 and the even more approachable 2021, compare favourably with their Burgundian counterparts. Recommended FT MagazineJancis Robinson Jancis Robinson on quirky new-wave Australian wines I was swept off my feet a decade ago when I tasted the first Tolpuddle vintage, 2012, especially the Pinot Noir.
The 2012 Chardonnay now looks not so much refreshing as positively tart. In this first year, they had the grapes pressed on the island and shipped juice, not grapes, to the winery in South Australia, exposing it to too much oxygen, so there was a problem completing the conversion of harsh malic acid to softer lactic acid. But that was the only real disappointment in this line-up of 19 wines, all screwcapped so they’re free of any cork taint or oxidation. (Vintage 2019 was the victim of wildfires and smoke taint, alas an increasing phenomenon in the wine world, so the 2019 Pinot Noir was sold off in bulk and the 2019 Chardonnay lacks the class of other vintages. But that was hardly the fault of the talented winemaker Adam Wadewitz, who arrived in time to make the second 2013 vintage.) Hill Smith also told us about his finest hour.
Tolpuddle is the only Australian wine to have featured in the annual tasting of some of the finest wines in the world, organised by the fine-wine-buying club Ficofi in Paris every December. At this glamorous event a few years ago, Aubert de Villaine, the Burgundian figurehead then in charge of the world-famous Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, approached Hill Smith and said he’d been advised that he must taste this Tasmanian upstart. I advise anyone with a taste for burgundy to do so too.
If you were in any doubt about the suitability of Tasmania to making top-quality fizz, you only need look at the results of this year’s recent Australian Sparkling Wine Show.
Most of the trophies awarded at the show, which assessed 150 entries from all over the country, went to Tasmanian wines: the 2007 Arras EJ Carr (reviewed here) was named wine of show and best mature wine (aged for more than five years on lees); the Pirie NV was best fizz aged between two and five years; the Kreglinger NV best fizz aged less than two years; and the 2017 Moorilla Muse Extra Brut Rose won the trophy for best pink sparkling.
Tasmanian sparkling wines are dominating wine shows and the industry celebrates with the return of the Effervescence festival. Rob Burnett
Okay, so a Tasmanian wine didn’t win the prosecco trophy – it was awarded to Yarra Burn, a mainland brand owned by Accolade Wines (also makers of the Arras) – but that’s only because there’s no prosecco grown on the island.
And yes, the trophy for best sparkling red went to Langmeil winery in the Barossa not a Tasmanian winery: but it would be a surprise if a cool-climate fizzy red did well in this category, which favours rich, ripe, warm-climate styles. (I’ll come back to the bubbly that won the final two trophies, for best young wine and best “other” sparkling – another exception to the Tasmanian rule – in a minute.)
Winemaker Ed Carr produced a modern classic with the 2007 Arras EJ Carr Late Disgorged. Kevin O’Daly
The key to Tasmania’s excellence in fizz is, of course, the climate: the milder summers and long, slow ripening result in chardonnay and pinot grapes with just the right freshness and delicacy of flavour, and all-important crisp acidity, to make top quality bottle-fermented and matured sparkling wine.
The winemakers of Champagne twigged to this climatic advantage many years ago: Jansz, the well-known Tasmanian sparkling wine brand now owned by South Australia’s Hill Smith Family Estates (Yalumba, Pewsey Vale, etc), was originally established in the 1980s as a joint venture between Louis Roederer Champagne and Pipers River pioneer Graham Wiltshire of Heemskerk.
Mumm breaks new ground this month with its first Tasmanian cuvée. Pablo Martin
Indeed, the champenois are still making regular treks to the opposite end of the earth: this month sees the release of the first Tasmanian cuvée from the house of Mumm (see review), to sit alongside two New Zealand sparkling wines the champagne producer has been making for a couple of years
There is one sparkling category, however – apart from prosecco and sparkling fizz – that neither Tasmania’s winemakers nor the big champagne makers seem all that interested in, and that’s pet-nat.
This very old production method – also called “ancestrale” – involves the wine finishing ferment in the bottle, where it stays, full of the spent yeast (called “lees”) until you open it; unlike the “méthode traditionnelle” used in Champagne, which involves re-fermenting wine in the bottle and then disgorging the lees.
This is why most pet-nats are cloudy and a bit coarse and very frothy. But as the trophy-winning Fairbank Ancestrale demonstrates, it is also possible to make much more refined, elegant wine using this technique.
Laurent Fresnet and Trina Smith collaborated on the Mumm Tasmania Brut Prestige. Will Salkeld
It’s a win, too, for a Victorian vineyard, among a forest of Tasmanian trophies. But it’s probably only a matter of time before the Apple Isle nails this sparkling wine style, too.
Australia’s sparkling spectrum
2021 Fairbank Ancestrale Rosé [Bendigo] A blend of shiraz and viognier with a splash of cabernet sauvignon, this wine finished fermenting in the bottle, was aged on lees for a few months and then partially disgorged, which removed most of the heavier lees and left just a little cloudiness for textural interest. It’s a super-refreshing example of the style, fragrant and deliciously dry, with crunchy pink berry fruit and just the merest hint of leesy funk to add complexity. $40 suttongrange.com.au
Mumm Tasmania Brut Prestige [Tasmania] To produce this cuvée, Mumm chef de caves Laurent Fresnet collaborated with Trina Smith, senior Australian sparkling winemaker for Pernod Ricard (owners of the Mumm brand), sourcing fruit from northern Tasmania vineyards and helping to blend the wine. It’s a very good inaugural release: super-pale yellow in the glass, creamy mousse, crisp aromas of cracked wheat and summer fruits; a really bright and refined aperitif style. $40 Available through Vintage Cellars and Dan Murphys
2007 Arras EJ Carr Late Disgorged [Tasmania] It is absolutely no surprise that this incredible late-disgorged fizz swept all before it at the Australian Sparkling Wine Show Awards this year. Made predominantly from chardonnay, the base wine went through malolactic before secondary ferment in bottle and then a staggering 14 years on lees before disgorging. This extended maturity brings both incredible complexity of flavour – you’ll find all the classic late-disgorged flavours in here, from toasted brioche to candied lemon, from hints of Vegemite to hints of fungi – but also remarkable finesse. The wine is still fresh and vibrant and citrussy on the tongue, and has great persistence and length. A modern classic. $266 houseofarras.com.au
NEED TO KNOW
Tasmania celebrates its rising status as a sparkling powerhouse with the Effervescense Festival next month.
On Saturday November 5, the Glaetzer Dixon urban winery and cellar door in Hobart is throwing its doors open for the Southern Spring Sparkling Spectacular, hosted by fizzy wine specialist and educator Curly Haslam-Coates, and featuring an array of styles, from funky pet-nat to late-disgorged and blanc de noir, made by producers from across the south of the island state. For tickets, go to gdfwinemakers.com/shop/sparklingfest
And after a two-year hiatus, Tasmania’s Effervescence Festival is back on again from November 10 to 13. A plethora of sparkling wine tastings, masterclasses, vineyard tours and entertainment will be on offer at both the main festival hub at Josef Chromy Wines in Relbia, as well as a host of cellar doors and restaurants around the Launceston and Tamar region. Comedian Merrick Watts will be MCing the gala dinner at Josef Chromy on the Friday evening, and performing his show (including interactive tasting) An Idiot’s Guide to Wine on the Saturday. See effervescencetasmania.com
