Somewhat unusually for a Hunter Valley winemaker who grew up in the area, Andrew Duff doesn’t come from a wine family. “I wasn’t from a family of winemakers or vignerons,” he says. “I got the bug for the industry when I was a toddler – barbecues with family out the front of Tyrrell’s on the old communal barbies, playing down by the river at Dalwood Estate, or even when dad would tear up Mount View Road to Briar Ridge in his treasured orange Datsun 180B with leather driving gloves donned.” High-school work experience at Reynolds Yarraman Winery and Wybong Estate sealed the deal, and Duff went on to study wine science at the Eastern Institute of Technology in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. After graduation, he racked up winemaking experience by working vintages at some relatively large-scale operations across Australia and New Zealand: Kirrihill in the Clare Valley, Church Road in Hawke’s Bay, and Tyrrell’s back in the Hunter.
These experiences were a small taste of what was to come when he took on a role at Tempus Two, part of corporate wine behemoth Australian Vintage. “When I was with Tempus Two, I oversaw at one point in time something like 74 different SKUs” – corporate lingo for individual product lines. The experience gave him invaluable insights into what the average Australian wine consumer looks for – for better or worse. “With commercially made wines of significant volumes, you just can’t push the envelope too much, as most consumers prefer something like a Volvo,” he says. “Very safe.” His time at Tempus Two came to an abrupt halt in 2022, when Australian Vintage pulled the pin on its Hunter Valley operations – and inadvertently gave Duff the nudge he needed to start thinking about the possibility of starting his own label with his wife, Jade.
“I’d always had a dream to have my own label, and with Jade being more behind the scenes and across the accounting side of things we certainly have the know-how,” Duff says. “But it was probably becoming redundant at Tempus Two when they shifted operations out of the Hunter and down to Mildura that that was the catalyst to it all. The Hunter wine industry equates for less than 0.05% of the entire Australian crush each year – there aren’t a lot of places to be a winemaker at here, and we weren’t ready to pull up stumps and relocate.”
“With commercially made wines of significant volumes, you just can’t push the envelope too much, as most consumers prefer something like a Volvo: very safe.”
Freshly severed from his corporate gig – and with some fresh wind in his sails from his experiences as a Len Evans Tutorial scholar in 2022 and Wine Australia Future Leaders participant in 2023 – Duff landed the winemaker role at Briar Ridge, where one of his first points of business was to have a tough chat with his new boss about the fact he was looking to start his own label. “When I came on, I spoke to Briar Ridge Director Jaclyn Davis and disclosed our dream to have our own label,” he says. “She felt it permissible if it didn’t create a conflict of interest – this would be the lawyer in her.” To ensure that Duff’s wines for his own label don’t come into conflict with his day job, he uses only non-Hunter fruit, and vinifies the wines at Vanguardist in the Barossa.
Duff’s approach in the winery is cheerfully flexible, with techniques determined by the preferred outcome rather than vice versa. “There aren’t really any rules for approach, it just depends on what sandpit you’re playing in,” he says. “I’ve always made traditional styles with a small contemporary twist – Jade and I love drinking traditional wines, contemporary wines, and more so wines with a little more edge. I think a little more edge is creeping into my winemaking every vintage.” Duff admits that the approach he uses for his own label is, in his words, “very outside of my normal winemaking approach”: “Indigenous yeast and bacteria, extended – beyond my normal comfort zone – maceration, very low sulphur, minimal filtration, no fining, no additions at all. I know senior management from Australian Vintage would definitely be shaking their heads a little!” The wines Duff makes for Briar Ridge skew more conventional in style, but the scope of operations there gives him plenty of room to play, too. “Having multiple tiers within the portfolio allows you to get expressive and experimental – but balance is always at the heart of everything,” he says.
Having come from a background where consistency is king, Duff finds the small scale of his own label an interesting challenge – “letting go of the wheel a little and allowing the fruit to be expressive and in control with minimal artefact,” as he puts it. “The goal posts certainly shift when you approach winemaking with very small volumes, but it still pushes the anxiety levels a little – there’s nowhere to blend it away!” he says. “Small batch, experimental wines can be fun and exciting, but at the end of the day the only real rules are – I’m sorry, this may offend some people – no Brettanomyces or mouse, and volatile acidity less than a 0.8 grams per litre threshold.” Keeping within that threshold for volatile acidity is a particular challenge for the whole-bunch/carbonic fermentations he does for Briar Ridge. “I love bunchy wines, but VA isn’t my friend, and there has been a lot of risk versus reward when it comes to chasing this style of wines,” Duff says. “I find this the most nerve-racking part of vintage each year, they need a lot of monitoring, especially when the winery isn’t really set up to do it and you have 46 other wines to share your attention across.”
“The goal posts certainly shift when you approach winemaking with very small volumes, but it still pushes the anxiety levels a little – there’s nowhere to blend it away!”
It should come as no surprise that Duff, Hunter born and bred, is interested in keeping the region’s viticultural traditions alive and well. “The thing I have been most proud of in the last year was a little fence jumping – with permission – to pinch some cuttings of riesling,” he says. “Although nowhere close to the ballad of Murray Tyrrell jumping the fence to liberate chardonnay from the experimental Penfolds HVD Vineyard, the then-General Manager of Briar Ridge, Michael Bentley, our Vineyard Manager Jeremy O’Brien and myself got to work on the zombie-zoned Pokolbin Estate to save more than liberate the last of a true Pokolbin riesling. We have now grafted these on clay soil at our Tallavera Vineyard, and had surplus cuttings which Andrew Thomas requested, which I believe will be grafted at the Braemore Vineyard on sand. It will be great to see these styles develop on different soils into the future – Dan and Andrew might owe me a beer or two one day!”
Duff is a realist about the headwinds facing the industry. “It certainly is a very precarious time in the Australian wine industry, but if we can navigate our way through this period maybe there is hope for us in the future,” he says. Of his own label, he says, “We know we will regret not doing it one day – and if it doesn’t work out, at least we will be able to say we gave it a shot.” His ambitions for the Duff label are relatively modest: “I’m hopeful Jade and I can be still doing what we love with small parcels of wine for Duff, it’s a passion project for us that we hope people enjoy,” he says. His vision for the future? “I’d like to think we will be exactly where we are today, just another 5-10 years older and wiser.” Through it all, his love of wine remains undimmed: “I like when wine, consumed responsibly, makes people smile and helps create memories,” he says. “There really is story in every bottle, whether it’s the story of the wine itself or the story of how, where, and with whom it was enjoyed.”
GET FIRST ACCESS TO THE NEXT WINE ICONS – DELIVERED
Find out moreEach month, get 3 bottles of our freshest discoveries. We taste thousands to bring you the best.
Join us and support emerging winemakers, sustainable vineyards, and the development of young professionals.
Please sign in or create account as candidate to bookmark this job
Please sign in or create account to save this search
Please sign in or create account as candidate to create a resume
