Gangster turned investigative reporter
launches his first wine
Twelve months after his first vintage, this Victorian winemaker is selling a wine inspired by a cult label in Spain, Persian poetry, and the land of his ancestors.
Max AllenDrinks columnist
Mahmood Fazal’s earliest memory of wine is of watching uncles drinking cask red out of fancy cups at family functions in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs when he was a kid.
“They thought it was the height of elegance,” he says. “It was only some uncles, though, the ones who held sway. They remind me of stories of the shah in the 1700s being the only one allowed to drink. A guy on a gilded
Fazal’s parents had moved to Australia in the late 1980s, fleeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Fazal was a “happy-go-lucky, suburban Aussie kid” at primary school, he says. Played cricket. Listened to Powderfinger. Flew under the radar. Until he was in year six, when September 11 happened, and the World Trade Centre towers came down, and suddenly everyone at school knew exactly who he was and where his family was from.
“Which is a very surreal thing, as a young kid, to have a new identity imposed on you,” Fazal says. “I thought of myself as an accepted member of the community. And suddenly, there was this distance. I began to spin out.”
The spinning out turned into violence, which spiralled out of control until, in year 10, Fazal’s father moved him to a private school, as a circuit breaker. It worked – for a time. An influential teacher introduced Fazal to art and literature and poetry and film: he would screen films by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and Iranian Abbas Kiarostami in class, seeding the idea that there are many ways of telling a story, and many different narratives.
Fazal stomping shiraz grapes, in preparation for making his first wine.
Inspired, Fazal went to film school. But finding work was hard, so he drifted back to the people he’d hung out with in early high school. He got involved in gangs, joined an outlaw motorcycle club, and was swept up in a world of drugs and violence.
But he kept reading. And writing. Obsessively. And when he left the gang behind, he started contributing to Vice, writing about crime culture from an insider’s perspective. Which led, in 2020, to a Walkley award, and then a job as an investigative reporter for the ABC’s Four Corners. (His report on Australia’s crystal meth supply chain, “Meth Highway”, aired on Four Cornersthis week.)
His ongoing fascination with poetry – particularly the work of Persian polymath Omar Khayyam – also provided a counter to the memories of his fabulous uncles and their cask wine.
“It made me think about wine drinking in a mystical way,” he says. “I read about spiritual drunkenness or ecstasy in both the Christian and Sufi traditions. And how, in a Persian literary context, the spirit of drunkenness can be rediscovering a taste of what had been lost.”
Travelling in Spain a few years ago, Fazal also discovered the visceral pleasure of wine and its profound connection to place.
San Sebastián in Spain is where Fazal developed a taste for a particular style of wine.
“I was in San Sebastián. I had €100 in my pocket and decided to spend it on what I hoped would be a memorable experience. So I ordered a Comando G Rumbo al Norte [a cult red made from a tiny old plot of mountain grenache vines near Madrid]. It was so dense it was like licking rocks. It was so vivid: I was walking through woodland covered in stones.”
Back in Australia, Fazal went looking for wines that provided a similar experience and discovered the red wines Josh Cooper was making from mature vineyards in central and western Victoria. Fazal had moved to the region and would see Cooper around, at places like Bar Merenda in Daylesford. So, he offered to help during vintage.
Bar Merenda in Daylesford, where Fazal met winemaker Josh Cooper. Penny Ryan
“For the first couple of years I was a cellar hand at Cobaw Ridge with Josh, Alan and Nelly Cooper. But then one evening we were a few bottles deep and Andy [Ainsworth, co-owner of Merenda], said he could get me a little tonne of shiraz grapes to play with if I wanted to make my own wine.”
And now, 12 months after his first vintage in 2023, and with help from Cooper, Ainsworth and another local wine identity, Jeremy Shiell, Mahmood Fazal has started selling that wine.
A glass of freshly poured Khun shiraz.
The imagery on the label, the name of the wine – Kuhn, “blood” in Persian – and the quote from Sufi poet Rumi on the back label (“The wine is intoxicated with us, not we with it”) all play on Fazal’s background and passions. But for him, the most important word on the label is “shiraz” – rather than “syrah”, which is the French name for the grape that many of his winemaking contemporaries, chasing lighter, more ethereal styles, choose to use.
“When James Busby, the ‘godfather’ of Australian wine, brought cuttings of this vine into the country in the 1830s, he called it shiraz,” says Fazal. “He wrote about how the vines had originally been introduced to the northern Rhone Valley [in France] by soldiers returning from the Crusades, who told great stories about the wines they’d had in the mountains of Shiraz [in present-day Iran].”
Modern DNA testing has debunked this myth, showing that the variety – called syrah in the northern Rhone – in fact emerged in the French region and has no connection to Shiraz, the place.
“But I thought it would be fun to lean into Busby’s Orientalist myth-making,” says Fazal. “I love how in Australia we entwined the mythical heritage of Shiraz wines with a character that’s uniquely our own.”
2023 Mahmood Fazal “Kuhn” Shiraz [Western Victoria]
“I wanted to dial everything up with this wine,” says Fazal. “Tannin, concentration, the lot. So, I picked the grapes later than most people would, kept the wine on skins for longer, in barrel a bit longer. It’s the opposite of what’s the trend with shiraz these days.”
Despite his best efforts, Fazal couldn’t escape the underlying coolness of the vineyard site and the coolness of the 2023 vintage (neither would he want to, of course). Yes, his shiraz is a fabulously deep and dense shade of purple as you swirl it in the glass, and yes, there’s plenty of substance, of black-cherry liquorice flavours – and plenty of the long, tangy, “amped-up” tannins he was chasing. But there’s also an unmistakable taste of time and place in the wine, there, in its hints of – yes! – dried blood on dusty earth, and a faint echo of gum-leaf litter as the wine fades slowly on the tongue. $60
Fazal poured his wine publicly for the first time at a recent event at the Kelvin Club in Melbourne, where he was in conversation with creative consultant and fellow wine-and-film obsessive James Hewison. I thank both for permission to quote from that conversation here.
