Originally part of a larger estate simply known as ‘Yering’, which had vineyard plots planted in as early as 1838, Yeringberg was purchased in the 1860s by Swiss nobleman Frédéric Guillaume de Pury and split off from its neighbours Yering Station and St Huberts. Frédéric oversaw Yeringberg’s winemaking operations while the Yarra Valley was hitting its stride as a remarkable colonial upstart in the late 1800s, famed for both quality and quantity. The boom was not to last, however – the threat of the grapevine parasite Phylloxera and an Australian love affair with rich fortified wines meant that the last vintage of the Valley’s early history took place at Yeringberg in 1921.
Given Yeringberg’s role as the overseer of the Yarra Valley’s first finale, it is somewhat fitting that the estate and the de Pury family, led by Frédéric’s grandson Guill and his wife Katherine, went on to play a prominent role the region’s revival. While the de Purys cannot claim to be the first to replant in the Yarra Valley (that honour goes to Reg and Bertina Egan’s Wantirna Estate, planted in 1963) nor the first to commercially release a modern Yarra Valley wine (Bailey Carrodus took that gong 1973 with the first Yarra Yering wine), their wines rapidly became established as one of a holy trinity of quality-minded Yarra estates alongside Mount Mary and Yarra Yering. Today, Yeringberg’s highly sought-after wines are made in small quantities by Guill’s children, sibling duo David and Sandra de Pury. Sandra takes care of the winemaking in the original 1884 on-site winery building, while David takes care of viticulture.
With so much history on the property and in these vines, David sees his role as custodian first and foremost. “It’s just a matter of fine-tuning it rather than anything else,” he says of his approach to viticulture. “If you taste a lineup of our wines, you can see that they’ve all definitely got characteristics of the wine-making style and the vines and the terroir. But you also see some influence of the season, whether it’s a really cool, wet year or a hot, dry year. We’re trying to minimise those effects of the weather so that in the hot years, the wines aren’t fully overblown and really concentrated. We’re trying to keep it more reflective of the vineyard rather than of the season.” To this end, de Pury deploys extensive shoot thinning to help with airflow, precision pruning for exact fruit placement in the canopy, and rigorous de-leafing to allow just the right amount of sunlight in.
There’s not much in the way of experimentation when it comes to viticulture at Yeringberg. Improvements here are slow and steady, the culmination of decades worth of small insights and observations rather than paradigm shifts or great leaps forward. “We have changed practices,” de Pury says. “They used to do a lot of cultivation up and down the rows. There’s pictures of horses, you know, cultivating between the rows back in the back in the 19th century. And then they had lots of problems with erosion, and those horses then had to drag the dirt from the bottom of the hill back to the top of the hill. But now we have permanent pastures underneath the vines. I made that transition 30 years ago.”
Those cover-crop grasses are now an integral part of Yeringberg’s approach to soil health. “We graze the sheep in the vineyards in the winter to turn over that biomass,” de Pury explains. “The grasses grow, absorb all the nutrients, and put a lot of biomass on top of the ground – but then the sheep chew it down, that goes back into the soil, and then that is able to then generate another crop. That extra-vigorous growth I think really helps the soil, because it opens up root channels for the vines and keeps biological activity going in the soil through the winter.” Part and parcel of this cover-friendly approach has been learning to take a laissez-faire approach to weeding and underline growth. “We don’t necessarily label weeds as weeds just for the sake of it,” he says. “If there’s something growing there, that’s good, and so long as it doesn’t get up into the canopy and interfere with what the fruit are doing or cause problems with too much humidity, then we’re happy to have things growing on the ground underneath the vines all year ’round – letting the grass grow up underneath the vines and forming a natural mulch under the vines.”
The grasses act as a natural sponge, drawing moisture from the soil – a good thing for Yeringberg, whose vines are planted on a light silty Silurian loam above moisture-retaining clay. Winters here can be too wet, which leads to problems when they’re followed by dry summers. “When the roots get pruned off by being waterlogged, they can’t take up enough water and can’t take up enough potassium,” says de Pury. “Even though there’s plenty of water in the ground, the vines then don’t have the roots to be able to access that water.” Somewhat ironically, this means that after very wet winters, de Pury has to irrigate. “Typically we will have to irrigate the marsanne a bit more than all the other varieties, because that’s the first one to sort of give up,” he says. “It’s a bit pathetic like that.”
An extensive array of sensors in the ground, now linked to the internet and feeding data directly to David’s phone, keep him informed about soil moisture and allow him to more precisely calibrate the site’s irrigation needs. Soil mapping via pits has also shed light on the way these vines grow their roots here – not just straight down, but also horizontally all the way out into the midrow, underneath the sward.
The challenge of growing grapes in this region has been rewarded by the important role the de Pury family continues to play in shaping the region’s wine story. The climate is “pretty conducive to maintaining freshness in the grapes and getting really good flavour of the grapes,” de Pury says. “We get enough warmth to fully ripe up those tannins to get the beautiful long, soft, silky tannins that are characteristic of Yarra Valley cabernet.” And while the wine-buying public might prefer to talk about and drink Yarra pinot, for de Pury the decidedly uncool cabernet and its close relatives – which go into Yeringberg’s eponymous Bordeaux-inspired blend – are the region’s real stars.
“The potential for cabernet is enormous here, and they’re consistently a much better wine than the pinot or the chardonnay,” de Pury says. “But somehow the label of pinot and chardonnay out of the Yarra Valley has stuck, and cabernet is way out of favour, unfortunately.” De Pury’s hope is that, as climate change makes Yarra Valley pinot harder to make consistently, “All those Pinot drinkers mature a bit more … and can start to appreciate Yarra Valley cabernet.” His current plantings of pinot – the 2022 vintage of which didn’t see commercial release owing to minuscule yields – are a hedge bet against this longed-for change: “We were thinking there’s not really much future in pinot because it’s getting hotter, and why should we bother? But then the market’s saying, ‘we want pinot, we want pinot’.”
The vagaries of the wine market weigh on de Pury’s mind – another angle to the question of sustainability. “It’s just really tragic that there’s so many fantastic, great quality grapes being grown in the Yarra Valley, and they just can’t find a home at the moment,” he says. “We have a vineyard growing beautiful [award-winning] cabernet … and we have fruit from that vineyard that we couldn’t sell this year. Nobody wanted to buy it at any price. We have more grapes than we can process at the moment, and we need to build a bigger winery so that we can process more. But in the meantime we just can’t sell the [excess] grapes, and so they’re sitting out there, waiting for sheep to come along and eat very expensive sultanas.”
Despite these ruminations, the de Purys are investing into their wine-growing operation, with new young blocks of marsanne (planted on rootstocks to avoid the looming threat of Phylloxera) starting to produce wine-worthy fruit. Row orientation here has pivoted from the traditional north-south, geared to a warm present and warming future: “With the new plantings, we’ve gone with north-westerly or west-north-westerly orientation, so that the sun is more overhead on the vine rows, and they just don’t get cooked in the afternoon,” de Pury says. “And now that the vines are up and going – they’re four years old, we get a few really hot days this year – just to see the way the vines just flew through without any scorching of the fruit was great.” The de Purys are giving back to the land that has nurtured their family for generations, too, planting in over 120,000 native plants – not just trees but shrubs and understory plants, too, for higher levels of biodiversity – and fencing off waterways to minimise the impact of their sheep and cattle. They’re even experimenting with a very un-sexy source of potential soil enrichment – the dags of matted wool and poo that have to be removed from their sheep’s rears, now baled up and awaiting deployment as vineyard mulch.
De Pury has the stoicism of a veteran farmer. “Every year is a different year, and it’s a different set of challenges,” he says. “It’s like a puzzle every year, trying to figure out – well, what’s going on this year? And can I see it before it before it goes wrong? Trying to steer it towards making another great wine.”
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