Like many other families in the King Valley, the Pizzini family first made their living as tobacco growers. “The Pizzini family was credited [as] being the largest grower of tobacco in the southern hemisphere at the peak of the tobacco era,” says Joel Pizzini, with an evident touch of pride. The family diversified into wine with their original 1978 riesling plantings – a smart move given the government restrictions and changing social mores that were shortly to wipe out the industry. (The last legally grown tobacco plants in Australia were destroyed in 2006.) “We were growing grapes largely for Brown Family and other wineries at the beginning of our wine story,” Pizzini says. This narrative changed with the establishment of Pizzini Wines as a label, which remains a family affair. “My eldest sister Natalie studied marketing, and my younger brother [Joel] studied business, [so] I ended up studying winemaking,” says Pizzini. “I didn’t really have much exposure to wine and hadn’t really tasted it much either, so it was a long shot. The one thing I did know was, I loved farming and being on the land.” Seeing winemaking as his “ticket to live and work on the farm”, Pizzini toughed out his studies and soon fell in love with his role.
Phylloxera’s arrival in the Whitfield Vineyard might have seemed catastrophic at the time, but that devastation had a silver lining – it gave the Pizzinis the courage to start afresh when they needed to. “Over the years we have completed a full facelift of all of our original vines, including shiraz, chardonnay and merlot, to Italian varieties,” Pizzini says. The fruit from those earlier plantings of international varieties – on rootstock after the devastating experience of losing the 1978 plantings – was originally sold to various makers around the country. Grafting over commenced in 1987 – a time when there were precious few Italian grape varieties planted on Australian soil, and cuttings were hard to come by. The Pizzini family launched their own wine label in 1994 with a chardonnay made by John Ellis of Hanging Rock winery. Within a few years the family wine business encompassed an on-site cellar door, on-site accommodation, and investments in several nearby hospitality ventures with the explicit aim of driving oenotourism to the King Valley. Having set the label up for success, and with Joel coming on board as a winemaker in 2002, the family switched its focus to strictly Italian varieties.
With so much experience in the matter, Pizzini is bullish about the benefits of grafting over. “We had a new variety with old root systems,” he says, “so we missed the juvenile stage of young vines. Having old vines gives balanced wines and consistent quality.” Rows here sit 2.5 metres apart, with vines spaced between 1.2–1.5 meters, cane-pruned on vertical shoot positioning trellis. Rootstocks such as 101-14 or SO4 chase water deep into the clay loam soil flecked with slate, with the team now erring on the side of growing vigorous rootstocks on poor soil to build root depth and vine resilience rather than planting traditional low-vigour rootstocks that require more external inputs (water and nutrients) to survive. To facilitate root development, the team avoids soil compaction and performs periodic deep ripping, which both aerates the soil and cuts some roots, stimulating growth. Canopy management and bunch thinning regimes are designed to promote even ripening of bunches and naturally reduce disease pressure.
Despite the impressive scale of the Whitfield Vineyard – hardly a minnow at over 80 hectares in size – Pizzini has made significant strides away from conventional viticulture and towards sustainable and regenerative growing practices. While they still occasionally deploy synthetic fertilisers and systemic fungicides, these are being limited wherever possible. Cows roam the vineyard “to keep grass down, spread some of their manure and help reduce herbicide use,” Pizzini says. “We create our own compost using used grape skins from our winery and blend that with hay we grow, along with local cow manure. This is spread throughout the vineyards to replace the nutrients we take when harvesting the fruit, and [it] slowly releases its nutrients back to the soil.” Blocks of vines that haven’t performed adequately have been removed, with regenerated wetlands taking their place – returning water to aquifers and providing habitat for wildlife.
The main impetus here is pragmatism rather than starry-eyed idealism. “I believe it has been the sum of many little strategies that have slowly improved the quality and consistency of our grapes over the past 10 years,” Pizzini says. “The primary goal is to produce mature fruit that is suitable for the wine label or tier it is produced for.” With the family producing wines that vary in ambition from $23 midweek thirst-quenchers to $165 statement pieces, this goal is easy to articulate but devilishly hard work to realise. Fortunately, Pizzini isn’t averse to calling in a little help from his friends, including a few internationally recognised names that he met during vintages in Tuscany. “We have been working with an amazing fellow called Alberto Antonini” – an Italian wine consultant famous for his work with the Antinori family in Tuscany and for his role in putting Argentine Malbec on the map – “for over 25 years now,” Pizzini says. “He really taught us what’s required to make quality grapes … and once you have the right characters in the grapes then you can make the wine the way you want to, no compromising.” Likewise, the Pizzinis have retained the services of Chilean soil scientist Dr. Pedro Parra, whose work with Alkina on their Polygon Project helped that estate win the 2021 Young Gun of Wine Innovative Vineyard of the Year award.
Having grown up in the King Valley, Pizzini is clearly a proponent of its terroir. “I love the diversity of the King Valley,” he says. “Starting at a height of 800 metres above sea level down to 250 metres, it has over eight different soil types, hills, flats, plateaus and nooks and crannies. There is almost a spot for every [single] grape variety. We generally have warm days and cool nights, which slows down the ripening process which helps the grapes to reach optimal flavour and maturity. Deep in our soils, there are decaying pebbles and rocks which give elegance, freshness and minerals to our wines. The soil and microclimate diversity within the King Valley allows us to produce a wide range of quality wines.” That diversity occurs as much inside the vineyard as it does outside, which is why the Pizzinis have invested in detailed soil mapping of their large site. While out walking the rows, “In some cases, you can see where soils may change but, in many cases, you can’t tell anything about the soil variation just by looking at the vine’s growth pattern and health,” Pizzini says. “You would have no way of knowing where to look for fruit variation without proper soil mapping.” After mapping the soils and separating out parcels of fruit based on the soil types they were grown on, tasting the trial wines was a revelation for Pizzini. “The nuances of each wine were so unique and different and mind blowing,” he says. By judiciously blending wines made from these individual parcels into their larger cuvées, they’ve been able to significantly increase the quality and price point of the finished wines: “from an average $25 per bottle to an average of $35 to $80 per bottle.”
Increasing the Pizzini label’s price point in a wine market that is seeing large declines in volume and value at the lower end is its own reward, of course, but it’s not the endgame. Pizzini’s aim is for his family’s operation to become “a leading Organic producer,” he says. “By understanding the land’s capability [through] soil mapping we can then apply best practice to those areas.” There’s still a lot of work to be done, but Pizzini seems invigorated by the task. “I love waking up and living in one of the most beautiful places in Australia,” he says. “I love the challenge of agriculture and that it pushes all your senses to the limits – sight, smell, feel and intuition – and you’re never doing the same thing all the time.”
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