“I just want to do right by the grapes,” Sierra Blair says of her winemaking approach. “I think because I come from a family of grape growers, I have that perspective – that respect for all the hard work that goes into the growing season. I don’t want a year’s worth of work to be misspent after it comes through the winery doors.” Remembering that she didn’t do the hard yards in growing the grapes keeps her humble and focused: “I just want to do my job well and not fuck it up!”
If her work at Ghost Rock Wine is anything to go by, she’s nailing that brief. Her responsibilities here are to oversee the estate’s two ranges – their main line of more traditionally styled wines, and the Supernatural sub-label, where she gets to take a more experimental approach. It’s a situation she relishes. “I am really lucky,” she says. “Each [has] their own styles and goals that reflect a good part of the spectrum of winemaking technique and philosophy.”
“I want people to taste what these varieties taste like on our dirt, in these rolling red hills overlooking the Bass Strait.”
For the estate wines, “I like to let the fruit and the site shine,” she says. “I tend to use a lighter hand with winemaking here, more a facilitation of the process rather than trying to imprint a watermark to let someone know I was there. … I want people to taste what these varieties taste like on our dirt, in these rolling red hills overlooking the Bass Strait.” The Supernatural range, by contrast, allows her to play with the full winemaking toolkit. “We push the boundaries and get experimental and creative with winemaking practices,” she says. “Lots of skin contact, co-fermentations, whites on skins, reds off skins, pét-nats, piquettes, all the fun stuff.”
While the distinction between her Ghost Rock estate wines and Supernatural wines holds fast on the shelves of wine shops, in practice her experience with both – alongside outside influences from Blair’s own label Zymo and her interest in Australia’s unique wine show system – goes on to inform her overall practice, ideas cross-pollinating between projects. Her example is Ghost Rock’s riesling – initially and unsuccessfully made in emulation of the Clare Valley’s clean, linear style: “I couldn’t make a steely, tight, highly aromatic and concentrated perfumed style of the Clare Valley,” she says. “Our site wasn’t giving us that fruit profile.” Tasting this riesling in the context of wine shows convinced Blair she was on the wrong track; Zymo’s experimental riesling (fermented in oak, with lees ageing and battonage) provided a potential solution. “So in 2024 for Ghost Rock, I took our earlier ripening block of Riesling, and fermented it in neutral large format barrels and incorporated some lees stirring,” she explains. “I kept the other portion of the fruit’s treatment the same – stainless steel ferment with an aromatic yeast. The resulting blend was just the right tweak we needed, bringing texture and weight into the fold.”
Not that Blair is into change for the sake of it. Her approach to Ghost Rock’s pinot noirs – already successful when she arrived in 2019 – has been one of respect for what owner and operational director Justin Arnold had already achieved. “There wasn’t much that needed to be changed,” she says. “Justin and I [are] fairly on the same page with pinot, agreeing that the work happens in the vineyard, and when it comes through the winery doors, the fruit and site need to shine. We don’t want to manipulate the character with whole bunch, extended maceration, or overuse of oak.” Small tweaks followed: more wild ferments, separating out individual clones for separate vinification, less filtration. “There’s not too much mucking around that needs to be done,” she adds. “Just clean ferments. We press the reds when just dry, put down to a restrained oak program. And voilà, it usually comes out great. Super generous, aromatic, and layered. I’m not trying to ‘get more’ out of these grapes because there is already so much flavour there.”
“I like to do the work with pinot at the blending stage,” she says. “We made eight different pinot noirs last year, so I like to give each clone and block equal opportunity to shine. I set up a structured blind tasting a couple times of year where core staff taste and classify all the different batches – sometimes up to 25. It is from these sessions that we craft and create completely different wines from the same site.” Despite its reputation for being finicky, she sees pinot noir as her workhorse variety: “It’s funny because people always talk about how hard pinot noir is to grow,” she says. “But I think when you have the right clones in the right soil it can be very reliable. And a variety of clones helps to achieve different results that add to layers of complexity within a blend.”
“People always talk about how hard pinot noir is to grow. But I think when you have the right clones in the right soil it can be very reliable.”
With her viticultural background, it’s not surprising that she looks first to the vineyard for solutions, rather than reaching for her winemaking bag of tricks. “If I think a particular clone or variety is not expressing to its fullest potential in the winery, my first port of call is to liaise with our viticulturist [Izaak Perkins] and to trial improvements in the vineyard – canopy management, crop load, compost,” she says. “If I am still not getting the results I want, that’s when I start messing with things in the winery, maybe playing around with a little skin contact, lees stirring, texture building, trialling yeast strains, or wild ferment. It’s a great feeling once you get something right that you’ve been working to improve.”
The close relationship between winemaker and viticulture team has already paid dividends for Ghost Rock. “During my first vintage, I saw our grape waste being eagerly picked up and trucked away,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘We’re giving away gold here’. I pushed for a compost program which was willingly adopted by the viticultural team, and [is] now something inherent to our annual practice.” Other improvements have followed with Blair’s input: “We’ve also moved away from herbicides, planting cover crops instead. Our ground here is so fertile, it just makes sense to grow things we want, rather than fight ones we don’t. We’ve been trialling biological sprays for botrytis, and have been farming one part of our vineyard organically for five years now – kind of a test patch to see if we want to expand the program to other blocks on our site. We do all this because we know it’s good for the land.”
Is it also good for the wines? Blair is ruminative on this point: “The direct impact it has on the wine is hard to say,” she says, “but if the wines keep improving in the long run, which I believe they have, it would be hard to disregard these practices as not having an effect.” She’s advocating for further change. “I see us continuing to push ourselves towards more sustainable and regenerative farming practices,” she adds. “I’d like to start converting more blocks to organic farming, and perhaps obtain certification for the part of the vineyard that is already eligible.” As for the wines, “I’d like to push myself further out of my comfort zone with the Supernatural Range, with the goal to one day release a pinot with no adds, no sulphur,” she says. “It still needs to look clean and fresh. Still working on it!”
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