When we left London Janene and I knew exactly where we wanted to live. We had picked the spot on previous visits: the valley of the Jamieson River. It took us six months to find the right property - eight riverside acres with a northerly aspect, access to water and a beautiful site for a house. The land was just rough pasture but it had huge potential.
There were no vineyards in the area then but I had a hunch the sloping
shaly clay and river-loam ought to grow good grapes. I experimented with several different varieties but best by a mile was Pinot Noir, which was fortunate because that was what we both liked best to drink.
The results over the first few years were patchy but promising, especially the Pinot, from which I made a series of bucket-and-stick vintages of varying awfulness. In amongst them, however, there were a couple of triumphs, enough to justify more extensive plantings in 2001.
But Pinot isn’t Burgundy. In the Nineties overcropping was widespread and too many Australian pinots were thin and fruit-driven. We were after something more layered, a wine that would linger on the palate and develop interest and complexity as it matured.
Progress towards our goal was slow and beset with difficulties but in 2006 we succeeded in producing a wine that truly showed what the land was capable of. The 06 Mount Terrible received 95 points in James Halliday’s 2010 Wine Companion and sells to some of the best restaurants in Australia and Europe, including London’s The Square (2 Michelin stars) and Chez Bruce (1 Michelin star).
We had high hopes for the 2007 vintage. The Gods thought otherwise. Frost blasted the buds and what little survived the smoke of bushfires tainted.
The harvest in 2008 was good, but in 2009 the bushfires came back. Again – a small enough matter compared to what others lost in that tragic year - the fruit was spoilt and another season’s work went for nothing.
It was beginning to look like we were only going to get a vintage every other year. Sure enough, after a near-perfect crop in 2010, we came close to losing everything once again due to unseasonable rain in 2011.
But then luck struck. Two weeks before harvest, the rain stopped, the fruit ripened and the wine we made is now safely in barrel.
