A textural, mineral-driven version of sauvignon blanc that shows how good this variety can get with a little bottle age.
A textural, mineral-driven version of sauvignon blanc that shows how good this variety can get with a little bottle age.
Leigh Ritchie’s Young Tree Wines project looks laid-back, but don’t let that fool you. While his label is named after a reggae album – Groundation’s 1999 debut, Young Tree – and he releases a wine named Natty Dred, Ritchie’s thinking about winemaking owes more to the upper echelons of California’s Napa Valley than it does to Rastafarianism. With a short and sweet array of wines in the lineup – a cabernet sauvignon, a marsanne/roussanne blend, and the aforementioned Natty Dred, a chillable red based most recently on merlot – Young Tree offers wines that hide serious quality behind their Rasta veneer.
It’s a long way from the high-rises of Wall Street to an urban winery in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, especially if you take a detour via Provence. This is the journey that financier-turned-winemaker Jarrod Kiven has undertaken, launching his eponymous label in 2022 with a just two wines – a Pyrenees syrah and Beechworth viognier. Since then he’s kept the label small-scale, resisting the temptation to expand the range in favour of keeping production strictly hands-on. Kiven produces a compact collection of wines – just two wines per annual release thus far – from cool-climate vineyards, using traditional methods to craft wines of serious intent.
Husband-and-wife duo Andy and Clare Ainsworth are hardly the only couple to have fled city life in the midst of the COVID pandemic – but few have made the transition so successfully. The Ainsworths moved from Sydney to Daylesford, central Victoria, in 2020, and by the end of 2021 they’d not only opened Daylesford restaurant Bar Merenda (winner of the 2022 Young Gun of Wine Wineslinger Best New Haunt award), they also had their first two wines under the A & C Ainsworth label resting and awaiting release. By leveraging Andy’s background as an experienced hospitalitarian and wine salesperson – he formerly managed the wine-centric Sydney venue 10 William Street – and Clare’s background as a designer and visual artist – you might recognise her work from the redesigned Eastern Peake wine labels – the A & C Ainsworth wines have travelled well beyond the list at Bar Merenda and can be found at a bevy of the country’s best eateries. With a trio of wines under the label – a grenache, a syrah, and a rosé made from cabernet sauvignon – and production levels firmly small-scale, the wines aren’t easy to find, but reward those who make the effort.
Pacha Mama Wines was started by Callie Jemmeson’s father over a decade ago, but she has taken what was a retirement project and turned it into a brand that works with ten varieties sourced from as many growers across Victoria. Her mission is to make wines that are “delicious and honest without the ego and pretence”. The structure at the winery was also crafted to be flexible, allowing for both her and female colleagues to juggle the demands of a family and a winemaking career. With no absolute rules in the winemaking process, Jemmeson makes both classic and experimental wines, working with established stars, such as pinot noir, shiraz, chardonnay and pinot gris, along with a raft of Italian varieties, including prosecco, sangiovese and fiano.
Doug Lilburne’s journey into wine started in kitchens in New York as a teenager, progressing through culinary school then to setting up a farm-to-table food program at a winery in Northern California. Winery work eventually drew him away from the stove, and vintages around the world followed. Now settled into his leased winery and vineyard in the Yarra Valley’s Steels Creek, Lilburne’s Mise en Place label focuses on home fruit and organic vineyards in the Pyrenees and Great Western to currently make a syrah, syrah and touriga nacional blend, and a syrah rosé. The winemaking is manual and traditional, with only sulphur added, and not always. The first release was in 2022 with wines from the 2021 vintage.
Charlie Mann traded in the recording studio for winemaking after a chance meeting with Owen Latta. An epiphany with one of Latta’s wines saw him ditch his long commute to take up work at Eastern Peake, where he still works. The Charles Oliver label was born in Mann’s second vintage, with 2023 being the fourth for the label. The offering is compact, focused on organic vineyards and earlier picking. Reds and whites both clock in at lower alcohols, with texture and fragrance uncluttered by oak, and are bottled with no fining or filtration and only a small dose of sulphur. The 2022 release saw two grenache cuvées and a syrah grenache blend, all from the Pyrenees.
This is the first syrah that Owen Latta has made since 2015, and it’s stunning stuff. An incredibly complex and darkly seductive wine, with wild fruits accented by exotic spices and craggy minerals – midweight, chewy and speaking loudly of place.
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