There are vineyards, and then there is the Forest Garden. Half an acre of chardonnay, 1,600 vines, planted in 2016 on a steeply sloped, south-facing site at 663 metres above sea level in the Yarra Valley – the highest-elevation vineyard in the region by some distance, sitting around 300 metres above the next closest site. The Forest Garden Vineyard belongs to Jayden Ong and his family, who did not simply buy land and plant it, but chose to live there. The vineyard is literally their garden – children, food crops and flowers growing alongside the vines, with the surrounding near-pristine native forest pressing in on all sides. No synthetic chemicals have ever been used on the site, no heavy machinery has ever entered it, no irrigation has been applied since the vines were planted, and no copper or sulphur has touched them. One wine is made: the Jayden Ong Forest Garden Chardonnay.
The decision to plant here was made back to front in the best possible way. Ong came to viticulture through hospitality – six years at Melbourne’s legendary Melbourne Wine Room, a Wine Science degree at Charles Sturt University, vintages at Curly Flat, Moorooduc Estate, Allies and Garagiste, and extensive travel through France, Italy, Spain and the United States – before co-founding Cumulus Inc. and Cumulus Up with Andrew McConnell. He launched his first wine label, One Block, in 2010. By the time he and his wife Morgan found land on Mount Toolebewong, he knew precisely what he was looking for. “I started working with wine through hospitality,” he says, “learning about ‘great’ wine from the end product – bottles on dining tables. Then I wanted to learn more, how these wines arrived on the table and where they had come from.” A forensic understanding of what he wanted in the glass – a marginal, high-elevation site in the Yarra Valley, capable of producing chardonnay of genuine tension and character – drove the search. “Chardonnay and its suitability to the Yarra Valley is why we bought land here with the vision to grow grapes on a marginal site,” he says. A mix of clones was selected – Entav Inra 548 and 1066, Bernard 76, 95 and 96, and a small amount of P58 – planted at a density of 1,600 vines to less than an acre, on rootstocks of 101-14 and 3309C, in 1.6m x 0.75m spacing. Ong dug each of the 1,600 holes himself, soaking every vine in seasol and mycorrhizal fungi before planting. He then watered them by hand a few times in the first months. He has not watered them since.
That the vines have grown and fruited without irrigation at this elevation, in this climate, speaks to the site’s fundamental character. At 663 metres, the diurnal temperature range is extreme – the kind of shift that compresses flavour compounds, retains acidity and extends the ripening season far beyond what lower-altitude Yarra Valley sites experience. No crop was achieved for the first six to seven years as the vines found their feet in the forest. That patience – the acceptance that a site this marginal operates on its own schedule – runs through everything Ong does here. “You can’t play God in the vineyard,” he says. The yields that have eventually emerged are extraordinarily low: between 200 and 500 grams of fruit per vine, a figure that makes even the most yield-restrained boutique operations look generous. Ong sees the concentration in that fruit as the product of the whole system: cool climate, long flavour ripening, minimal crop load and what he calls “positive farming.”
The farming philosophy at Forest Garden is one of the most radical and rigorously considered in the country. From the outset, Ong set himself a challenge he acknowledges was unusual: to farm world-class chardonnay without the use of copper or sulphur – the foundational disease-management tools of organic viticulture, and the conventional backstop that almost every grower, conventional or otherwise, reaches for. “After what I had seen with other vineyards I felt there was another way,” he says. “I feel we have arrived there with some persistence, plenty of research and practical trial and error.” In their place, Ong has assembled a layered system of biological and botanical interventions: whey from a local cheesemaker for powdery mildew control; potassium silicate and ecocarb; chamomile grown on the property and brewed into a foliar tea for downy mildew prevention; pre-flowering phosphonic acid applications; Crop BioLife, a plant synergist made from orange and coconut extract that helps dry out downy; fish, kelp and fulvic acid applied across the season; and Lockout, a beneficial microorganism product for mildew and botrytis management. The only pesticide inputs are an early eco-oil application and occasional neem oil. “It is rarely just one product that will fix it long term,” Ong says. “It is a combination approach that is required. It’s never set and forget.”
The vineyard has never been tilled. The soil beneath the vines has never been cultivated. Pea straw mulch was used in the early years; now Ong holds back and mulches at the end of spring, using the cover crops growing in the mid-rows as the material. Weeding was originally done by hand with a three-pronged hoe – backbreaking work on a 12 per cent slope – until a new attachment for the whipper snipper reduced the job to five days per pass. Calciprill is applied once every two years to moderate soil pH. Compost is applied once every three years. Pruning is done by hand, guided by sap flow rather than a fixed calendar. Every operation, without exception, is carried out without heavy machinery. The result of a vineyard without compaction, without tillage, without synthetic inputs, growing in what was essentially virgin farming land when Ong arrived, is a site teeming with life – bees, lacewings, ladybugs, wasps and predatory insects, their populations fluctuating naturally with their food sources. When aphids appear, the ladybug numbers surge. “Keeping the vineyard ‘neat’ is not a priority,” says Ong, “however keeping it healthy is.”
The biosecurity protocol is as singular as everything else here. No-one enters the vineyard apart from the family and one long-term winery worker who does not work in any other vineyard. A six-foot deer fence separates the vines from the surrounding forest. When visiting other vineyards, Ong uses a boot bath and does not wear those boots back into his own site. There is no shared machinery. There is no movement of equipment between properties. The integrity of the site – its virgin microbial history, its freedom from any external chemical history – is treated as the irreplaceable asset it is.
The goals Ong articulates are not the goals of a regenerative farmer in the conventional sense – this land had not been farmed before, so there was nothing to regenerate. The ambition is something rarer: to improve a site from first principles, to leave it in better condition than it was found, and to do so without negatively affecting the native flora and fauna of the forest around it. “The goal has always been to improve this site and leave it in a better condition than when we took it over,” he says. “Can we change the way vineyards are farmed? I’m not sure. But I know we can certainly farm in a positive way on our own site and it’s working.”
What it produces – a single chardonnay from half an acre of vines, farmed by one family at the top of the Yarra Valley – is less a wine than a document of a place. Cool, long-season, unirrigated, chemical-free, harvested by hand at yields that most vignerons would find untenable. The Forest Garden Vineyard is, by almost any conventional measure, not a practical vineyard. It is something more interesting than that.
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