Keith Tulloch founded his eponymous winery in 1998 after considerable experience at home and abroad. Tulloch works across seven vineyards, with the home site the Field of Mars Vineyard, with 5.4 hectares of vines planted to semillon, chardonnay, shiraz, viognier, touriga nacional and tempranillo.
The Field of Mars site was first planted in 1968, and Tulloch regards the vineyard as one of the best for semillon in the Hunter. It’s a site he’s lovingly restored with the help of his father, Dr Harry Tulloch (a viticultural research scientist), since its purchase in 2008. Today, the vineyard is managed by Brent Hutton who farms with sustainability as a core principle.
“By working with this site over many years, we have learned that the best expressions from these vines are at lower alcohols, making finer, prettier and more elegant wines… Stylistically we are aiming to create that light to medium-bodied dry reds or even so far as to create ‘Hunter River Burgundy’, dare I say it. That really requires the fruit to have concentrated and ripe flavours even at quite low Baume [sugar level], and this is something that we regularly achieve with our Field of Mars wines.”
“Within our business we have a wide range of sustainability initiatives, which fall into the three key areas of soil health, biodiversity and emissions reduction,” says Hutton. “These principles guide our decision making and have led to a complete overhaul of the way we operate since 2017. We now use only organic fertiliser in the vineyard, recycling marc and chicken manure instead of chemical fertilisers which have harmful impacts on soil health and emissions.”
The majority of the 5.4-hectare vineyard is made up of 1968 vines, with 0.4 of a hectare planted between 2014 and ’17. The Hunter heroes of semillon, shiraz and chardonnay take top billing, but viognier also features, touriga nacional has recently been grafted onto marsanne vines and tempranillo has been planted on rootstock. Those last two varieties are somewhat of a response to longer and hotter summers, with an eye to the future, but the classic wines that already come off the site are very much pitched in an elegant vein.
“By working with this site over many years, we have learned that the best expressions from these vines are at lower alcohols, making finer, prettier and more elegant wines,” says Hutton. “…Stylistically we are aiming to create that light to medium-bodied dry reds or even so far as to create ‘Hunter River Burgundy’, dare I say it. That really requires the fruit to have concentrated and ripe flavours even at quite low Baume [sugar level], and this is something that we regularly achieve with our Field of Mars wines.”
Hutton points out that the Field of Mars vineyard neighbours some of the most iconic semillon vineyards in the world, including Braemore and Tyrrells HVD. “We share our sandy alluvial soils with those great sites,” he says. “The age and clone of our semillon is vitally important, but so is the vineyard management, so the way we try and promote healthy soils and biodiversity makes for healthy vines and that creates the magic we see as the final product.”
Manure, compost and hay mulch are applied to the soil, which now teems with earthworms and beneficial microbes. A range of winter cover crops are grown in the vineyard mid-rows, which Hutton says achieves many of their sustainability goals. “These crops provide habitat for native beneficial species, sequester carbon from the atmosphere and replenish soil nitrogen. Currently, we are using several different annual and perennial under-vine species of grass, clovers and flowers to increase the soil’s organic matter naturally, reduce our water usage and hopefully eventually completely eliminate the need for herbicide within our vineyard.”
The heavier clay soils of some blocks are mulched rather than cover cropped, which helps to suppress weeds, increase organic matter and help retain water in the soil. Hutton notes that previous management employed heavy cultivation and under-vine herbicide treatments, which left the site with compacted, bare and poor soils. “Now we rarely break the earth at all, only once annually when we resow in our winter cover crop,” he says. “This allows the midrow and under-vine cover crops to replenish the soil and rebuild structure. When spring comes around, we terminate the midrow cover crop mechanically with a crimper roller, which makes a thick layer of organic matter on the vineyard floor.”
Led by production manager Alisdair Tulloch, areas that were once nuisance zones full of undesirable weeds are now significantly important biodiversity corridors, with a predominance of casuarina trees diversified by planting other arboreal species and spreading seeds of native grasses and other beneficial plants. These corridors benefit native animals and insects, while they also act as wind breaks to protect the vines, which is especially important at delicate times like flowering. Native garden beds adjacent to the vines are planted to flowering species, becoming havens for beneficial native insects, birds and micro-bats, helping to deplete pest insect populations.
“The effect of our biodiverse garden beds on the vineyard have been a real eye-opener. Initially, when planting these beds, we knew theoretically it would promote beneficial insects, but it surpassed even our wildest imagination. When pests like vine moth and light brown apple moth started to appear in the subsequent seasons, our instinct was to spray pesticide to save the crop... Fortunately, we held our nerve, waited instead, and within a few weeks of the pests arriving they just disappeared. We have built up a healthy culture of bugs and biodiversity in the vineyard that seem to keep everything in check. It was very pleasing to see that all the extra hard work is paying off while promoting native species.”
“Every year, we plant hundreds of native trees from a local nursery in the riparian areas [those adjacent to waterways] and tree lines surrounding the vineyard blocks to further enhance the local biodiversity,” says Hutton. “These parts of our vineyard are reserved particularly for this purpose and total several hectares. We see our vineyard as a piece of the natural environment, so these programs are about harnessing the benefits of that environment and using them practically, while also giving back every year to the land.”
That biodiversity has meant pesticides have become redundant with the increase of predatory populations. “The effect of our biodiverse garden beds on the vineyard have been a real eye-opener,” says Hutton. “Initially, when planting these beds, we knew theoretically it would promote beneficial insects, but it surpassed even our wildest imagination. When pests like vine moth and light brown apple moth started to appear in the subsequent seasons, our instinct was to spray pesticide to save the crop… Fortunately, we held our nerve, waited instead, and within a few weeks of the pests arriving they just disappeared. We have built up a healthy culture of bugs and biodiversity in the vineyard that seem to keep everything in check. It was very pleasing to see that all the extra hard work is paying off while promoting native species.”
The quest for sustainability is also part of larger mission beyond fruit and wine quality. “Keith Tulloch Wine takes very seriously our impact on the environment, both onsite and throughout our entire supply chain,” says Hutton. “This desire to run a sustainable vineyard and wine business led to us becoming the first Hunter Valley winery to be certified carbon neutral by the Australian government’s ‘Climate Active’ program in 2019. We’re only the second vineyard or winery in the country to achieve this certification.”
The vineyard also has higher density plantings of chardonnay and shiraz, which typically generate some of the best fruit, even though the vines age is much younger. “We have purchased new smaller tractors and implements to work with the smaller row widths and headlands,” says Hutton. “Trials related to our massale selections of semillon and shiraz have also seen an improvement in our genetic material, with better bunch structure and more naturally low yields, which we desire for high quality wines.”
That constant tinkering sees many trials in the vineyard, including reworking the older vines to improve vine health and structure. “The older parts of the vineyard have the original steel pickets and wire from the mid-1960s still in place, so each year we have a lot of re-trellising work to do as well as improvements in irrigation,” says Hutton. “Each year, we’re greatly improving each block one by one.”
This restorative work is seeing dead wood removed from the old vines, then retraining, which gives the vine a more productive life and eliminates any trunk disease, a persistent problem. It also provides the benefits of a large and deep-reaching root system that can take advantage of the increased soil health with its enhanced populations of symbiotic fungi and microorganisms. Those vines also have better access to groundwater, a distinct advantage in the heat of the Hunter, especially as some of the older vines are still dry grown.
Hutton notes that while it is hard to pin any one viticultural practice to improvements in fruit and wine quality, the fruit is consistently more balanced with good flavour at lower sugar ripeness. “We have been very impressed with the flavour of the semillon, chardonnay and shiraz at lower alcohols of 11–12.5% than in the past when they might have tasted a bit too green at that point, and we have proudly made wines within these levels since 2021,” he says
“I am fortunate to work with the team here. We are all likeminded with a common goal to make wines that best express our site – it makes every day coming to work a passion rather than a job. This coupled with the site’s location, being such a special patch of dirt with some very old vines, means we can go about our work and know that at the end of the day the vineyard does the storytelling in the glass.”
Please sign in or create account as candidate to bookmark this job
Please sign in or create account to save this search
Please sign in or create account as candidate to create a resume
