“Sonnen is an exploration and an implementation of everything I have experienced in my brief career in wine, as well as a continual learning, experimentation and creative process,” says Andree. “We want the wines to be deeply about this place but also to breathe new life into it… live on the edge stylistically. We are not yet wedded to any one variety or vineyard, so it allows us to explore the island and learn about each of its regions and what they are capable of.”
In 2012, Andree was pursuing a career in physiotherapy, keeping himself funded by working at his local Dan Murphy’s while he studied in Melbourne. A taste for not just wine but the role it played in culture around the world became an abiding interest, so he enrolled at Charles Sturt University and swapped the bottle shop for vineyard work. Wine-growing also knitted in well with his eventual intent to head home to his native Tasmania.
“We’re not beholden to tradition or set styles. We can make 100-day skin-contact white wine from some of the oldest riesling vines in the state, or lighter picnic reds from vineyards that often yield big winery ‘Gold Medal’ wines that go for the big bucks and sell out before the shops see them.”
Meeting Pat Underwood (Little Reddie) and Tim Sproal (Minim) in 2016, Andree went to work with them at Boomtown Winemakers Cooperative in Castlemaine for the 2017 harvest. “I met not just those two but a whole bunch of guys and girls who were just having a heap of fun making wine in all sorts of places, be they commercial wineries or in sheds with lean-tos and dirt floors. Coming from growing grapes in Tasmania, which at the time was very traditional, it made me realise that wine can be made anywhere, as long as it is done with love and passion and fun.”
A return home briefly saw vineyard work at Stefano Lubiana, before the 2018 vintage at Oakridge and then the role of managing vineyards for Mac Forbes in 2018–19. Andree also spent the ’19 European harvest in the Mosel at the biodynamic Weingut Melsheimer.
At the end of 2019, Andree and his partner Yolanda Zarins (who works on the design and marketing side) moved back to Tasmania for good, with Andree taking up a viticultural role with Jono Hughes at Mewstone. “Tasmania is our home,” Andree says. “We both grew up here before both moving away to the mainland to study… Winemaking seemed like a good excuse for me to throw in that career and move back before meeting Yoki… then we travelled together and came back to start a family. We love this place and wouldn’t do it anywhere else.”
“We want to do justice to the tireless work of the people who grow them – who are often our mates. The greatest moments for us are those where we can share the finished product with the girl or guy who has spent their entire year growing the fruit.”
The position at Mewstone also meant he could also use the winery to make the Sonnen wines, though the inaugural 2020 vintage wines, a pinot noir and riesling, were made at Nick Glaetzer’s winery. That’s an example of just how helpful the local winemaking community is, says Andree.
“I consider myself exceptionally fortunate to be a part of the wine community in Tasmania. It’s the equivalent of a younger me getting to hang out and talk cricket with my idols, like Brett Lee and Steve Waugh, except now we talk about fermenting grapes and drink riesling from unfathomably steep slate cliffs in Germany. There are too many names to mention, but I seriously do have to pinch myself sometimes when we’re all together and I realise that I’m in their company.”
Andree says that he is trying to make a more contemporary style of Tasmanian wine. “We feel that we are riding a new wave of smaller producers entering what has long been an old school wine-producing region and shaking things up a bit. There is a certain reverence given towards Tasmanian wine, pinot noir in particular, and for good reason, but the thing we want people to do while drinking our wines is to have fun. It doesn’t have to be a super serious or even memorable experience. As long as it can accompany good times, then we are happy.”
The current releases consist of a light dry red from syrah, pinot noir and pinot meunier; a riesling and gewürztraminer blend with a whisper of skins; a varietal chardonnay; and a blend of pinot noir and riesling. “We’re not beholden to tradition or set styles,” says Andree. “We can make 100-day skin-contact white wine from some of the oldest riesling vines in the state, or lighter picnic reds from vineyards that often yield big winery ‘Gold Medal’ wines that go for the big bucks and sell out before the shops see them.”
That approach is very much about the styles of wine they prefer, as well as pushing boundaries, but Andree stresses that there is no intention to be controversial. “This isn’t to say we don’t have an absolutely deep respect for this place and its vines. Everything we do in the winery is striving towards achieving a pure and faithful expression of the place it’s coming from and doing those who grew it proud.”
Andree notes that all the wines are fermented in oak, mainly older, with natural primary and malolactic ferments followed to completion. All the wines are unfiltered, so he believes to keep modest sulphur levels, completing full malolactic conversion is critical to stability, even if whites can take well into the following summer to finish. “It can get a bit tight preparing for vintage and still worrying about getting wines ready for bottling to make room in the shed – it’s a big practice in patience,” he says.
In the pursuit of lighter styles of reds, he also sometimes either direct presses some juice or bleeds some off as a saignée to make a small amount of rosé. Those wines are then blended back in later. “It may seem counterintuitive to take juice out of a ferment just to add it back in when blending the wine, but I’ve found that I like the freshness and energy even a small amount of lighter style wine can bring to a table red in a bigger blend,” he says.
“We bottle everything by hand and gravity and seal things up with corks, which along with being a more sustainable closure than tin seals, are just way nicer to pop. Unfortunately, living on this island means that our food miles can get pretty high when it comes to packaging, and that is something that is unavoidable, though we have moved to 100% Australian produced glass as a start, and working as locally as we can with suppliers of dry goods.”
Andree says the aim is pretty simple, to make “tasty wines” that express the sites they come from. “We want to do justice to the tireless work of the people who grow them – who are often our mates. The greatest moments for us are those where we can share the finished product with the girl or guy who has spent their entire year growing the fruit, stressing at midnight during spring when they hear rain on the roof, fixing a broken sprayer at 6pm on a Friday afternoon or pruning in fog so thick that you can’t see the next vine, just so we can have an easy time of it for two months of the year.”
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