The story of how Box Grove arrived at roussanne, vermentino, garganega, nebbiolo, negroamaro, primitivo, grenache, mourvedre, viognier, picpoul, prosecco, touriga, arinto and sezão – alongside small residual plantings of shiraz and roussanne from the original vineyard – is inseparable from a series of shocks and revelations that Sarah Gough has turned, consistently, into opportunity.
The vineyard was established to supply a large wine company with shiraz and cabernet on a ten-year contract for their export programs into the UK and US. That contract ended abruptly in 2009, when the Global Financial Crisis sent the company retreating back to its own estate fruit. “One of the regular cycles of boom and bust in our industry,” Gough says. But the ending of the contract exposed a deeper problem: not just the loss of a customer, but the fact that the climate in central Victoria had fundamentally shifted in the fifteen years since the vines were planted. “Our first harvest was in 2000 and the shiraz fruit we picked that year was a light crop, picked at the end of April,” she says. “By 2009 we were picking shiraz in mid-March.” The varieties that had made sense for a cool-climate export strategy no longer ripened the same way – and the market had moved anyway.
The pivot that followed was both practical and visionary. Looking at the vineyard’s warm, dry summers and cool, wet winters, Gough began to see the region through a different lens. The climate matched not the traditional cool-climate wine regions of Victoria, but the Mediterranean wine regions that thrived in similar conditions – southern France, southern Italy, Portugal. “I could see the region’s warm, dry summers and cool, wet winters lent itself to varietals from the warmer Mediterranean grape growing regions,” she says. “And knew these areas made crisp textural dry white wines and delicious medium-bodied reds in spite of their warm ripening conditions.” Starting in 2009, she began grafting systematically – a hectare here, a couple of hectares there, every year – until the vineyard bore almost no resemblance to what she had planted. Prosecco came first and proved commercially transformative, becoming the engine room of the business and opening doors to wine bars and restaurants for everything that followed. “I grafted over some prosecco in the first year of grafting and have been able to ride the wave of its popularity for the last 15 years,” she says.
“We have discovered that the whites we grow – roussanne, vermentino, garganega and arinto – have better flavour and character when growing on the banks of granite sand. The wines reflect the minerally flavours from the soil.”
The soils have been as important as the climate in guiding variety selection. Box Grove has three distinct soil types across the 27 hectares: deep red clay, banks of granite sand and gravel sitting over ancient creek beds, and heavier clay – the last of which proved inhospitable enough that vines were eventually removed. The reds went to the deep red soil; the whites to the granite sand. “We have discovered that the whites we grow – roussanne, vermentino, garganega and arinto – have better flavour and character when growing on the banks of granite sand,” Gough says. “The wines reflect the minerally flavours from the soil.” Reds on the deep red clay – grenache, nebbiolo, negroamaro, primitivo, sezão – produce a different register entirely: soft, fragrant, medium-bodied. “The grenache we grow is not as powerful as grenache from other warm wine regions in South Australia like the Barossa or McLaren Vale,” says Gough. “It is softer and more feminine in style. Similarly the nebbiolo we grow is fragrant and medium-bodied, delicious as a rosé or a sparkling rosé.”
The detail in how Gough thinks about her fruit is one of the distinguishing qualities of Box Grove as a grower. Each buyer has different requirements, and Gough manages her blocks accordingly – selecting fruit from specific soils for specific styles, manipulating irrigation timing to build or soften tannin structure as needed. “After managing the vineyard and working closely with each buyer in recognising what they want out of their fruit, we challenge the watering program to produce wines with bolder tannins for some of the buyers, through watering and holding back on watering at different times in the season.” The result is a kind of bespoke viticulture at scale: the same variety, from different blocks and different soil profiles, producing quite different characters. Pruning methods are equally calibrated – Italian varieties tend to be cane pruned, French ones spur pruned, with active trials currently underway in the sezão block to resolve ripening inconsistency.
Some of the most interesting things to come out of Box Grove have arrived through the back door of adversity. The roussanne block is among the oldest in the vineyard, planted in 1996 from cuttings with a lineage tracing back to four buds sent by Gérard Jaboulet in the Rhône to Guillaume de Pury – cuttings that also found their way to Yeringberg, Yering Station, Tahbilk, Mitchelton, Giaconda and Rutherglen Estates. When a drought-era extension of the roussanne block was grafted onto Paulsen rootstock, the vines grew larger and more vigorous than the original planting – producing bigger bunches, more shading, and fruit that resisted the refinement Gough was seeking for table wine. Rather than discard the block, she found a different use for the fruit. “In 2011, when winemaking options are limited – cool, wet, full of mildew in the reds – I started to take advantage of the cool, wet conditions and experiment with making a verjus from the fruit,” she says. “It was initially aimed toward chefs and home cooks.” The verjus, made from half-ripe roussanne at 7 baumé, is now Box Grove’s second largest-selling product after prosecco, used daily at Attica and in the bars of Hazel, Farmers Daughters and Restaurant Botanic. “That is all resultant from a decision made from the fruit flavours we produced from the decisions we made in the vineyard,” Gough says. “Being a small winegrower and being unrestricted by large company bureaucracy, I can change tack quickly, trust my gut feel and fly below the radar. And from what first appeared as a problem became something I am so proud I stumbled into.”
The visit to Château Beaucastel in Châteauneuf-du-Pape in 2019 confirmed something Gough had already half-sensed. Standing in the vineyard among 80-year-old, hip-high roussanne vines ripening in the reflected heat of ancient river stones, she saw the warmth celebrated rather than apologised for. “The winemakers were celebrating the warmth their region has, not ashamed of it as we sometimes felt in central Victoria,” she says. “I realised I had made the right decision with my vineyard to graft over these warmer climate varieties and to celebrate our region, our soils and our varieties and let them ripen perfectly.”
Sustainability at Box Grove is approached with the same pragmatism that characterises everything here. Cover cropping is not possible in a high-frost-risk site where midrows must stay slashed low from mid-September until late October. Instead, extensive native plantings – worked on in partnership with the Euroa Arboretum, local seed savers and the Taungurung people – are being established in and around the vineyard, designed to attract native wasps and birds to manage light brown apple moth and reduce spray reliance. Four frost fans protect the site from the increasingly frequent spring frosts that come with the region’s shifting climate. Dung beetles have been introduced to break down cattle manure and cycle nutrients back into the soil. A new weather station is being installed to monitor soil and leaf moisture in real time, enabling more precise irrigation and reducing unnecessary water use from the ancient aquifer the property draws from.
For all the variety and complexity of what grows at Box Grove, the place has a coherence that comes from one person’s sustained and attentive relationship with a piece of country. “I love where I live and work,” Gough says, “the tall river red gums, the pink light at dusk as the kookaburras call to each other and the guinea fowl chatter in the trees telling each other where they had found the best grasshoppers and snails that day.” The guinea fowl, it should be noted, earn their keep – moving through the blocks eating the insects and snails that sprays would otherwise target. Box Grove is, in that sense, the whole approach in miniature: something that started as a practical solution, and turned into something rather wonderful.
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