2013 The Hairy Arm Nebbiolo Heathcote

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Thirteen years on, this nebbiolo proves the variety’s rare gift for graceful ageing – dried roses, tar, leather and amaro-like bitterness replacing primary fruit in a wine that’s moved into savoury, serious territory.

Producer
The Hairy Arm
Region

Heathcote
RRP

$60
Vintage

2013
Variety/Varieties

Nebbiolo
Alc./Vol.

14.9%

Thirteen years of age have transformed this wine – deep garnet in colour, with savoury, earthy flavours like tar, dried herbs and a touch of bitter amaro replacing fresh fruit. Silky and full-bodied, with soft, grippy tannins and a long, spiced finish. A rare taste of how beautifully this variety can age. Give this one a little decant, so the wine can properly wake up from its slumber.

Nebbiolo is a genuine paradox of a grape – a combination of elements that, on paper, shouldn’t work. It can achieve real ripeness while holding onto searing acidity. It rarely turns rich or sweet-fruited the way most reds do at higher ripeness, instead staying savoury and firmly tannic. It’s pale in colour when young and only deepens with age – the reverse trajectory of almost every other red variety. It’s the grape behind Barolo and Barbaresco, revered as arguably Italy’s greatest, and yet it’s famously reluctant to travel: finicky, site-obsessed, and largely unsuccessful anywhere outside a handful of cool, elevated pockets around the world. Australia is one of the very few places it’s found a genuine second home.

Steve Worley never planned on becoming a winemaker. He was a career exploration geologist with a master’s degree in geology when, in 2001, he walked away from it all to study viticulture and oenology – chasing a long-held dream of applying his love of earth science to the crafting of small, exceptional wines from special sites. The Hairy Arm began as a university project in 2004, built on small parcels of Shiraz from a carefully selected site in Sunbury, Victoria. It’s grown from a labour of love into a small, closely-watched label, but the geologist’s instinct for reading site and soil never left Worley. It’s the thread that runs through everything he makes. In 2010, Worley secured long-term access to a tiny, mature, low-yielding parcel of nebbiolo at Colbinabbin in Heathcote – a variety that very few people were growing in Australia at the time, let alone taking seriously. As Worley points out, the vineyard sits on Ordovician quartz-rich meta-sediment bedrock, with lean topsoils riddled with ironstone pebbles washed down from the adjacent Cambrian greenstone belt – the kind of ancient, mineral-driven geology that, as a trained geologist himself, he can’t help but be drawn to.

Thirteen years on, this 2013 release is a wine that has fully shed its primary fruit and moved into deep, savoury, tertiary territory – proof that nebbiolo, so revered in Piedmont for its rare capacity to age with grace, can do exactly that on the other side of the world in Heathcote’s ironstone soils, and that Worley’s quiet, geologically-minded approach to winemaking was built for the long game from the very start.

Tasting note

Thirteen years on, this is a rare chance to taste nebbiolo’s evolution in full bloom. Deep garnet, with a glistening, mature edge to the colour. The nose is savoury and complex – tar, dust and cured meat sit alongside balsamic and amaro-like bitterness, with lifted notes of sarsaparilla and coffee, and a touch of potpourri florals – dried rose and iris – threaded through sun-baked earth and mushroom. Sour cherry and orange peel eventually emerge, but this is a wine past its primary fruit, moving fully into serious, savoury territory – a decade-plus of bottle age laid bare in the glass. The palate is full and silky, with dark cherry, cinnamon spice and a cherry-cola candied note building over fine, fully-resolved tannins that grip and hold. Amaro-like bitterness punctuates a long finish. Old-school in style, with real extract and presence – a distinctly Australian take on nebbiolo, and proof of just how gracefully the variety can age.

When to drink

Give this one a little decant before you dive in – a bit of air unlocks its aromas and flavours and lets those tannins soften further, so the wine can properly wake up from its slumber. You could pair with a contemplative mood and slow consumption – it has taken its time to get ready for you, so it will treat you well if you return the favour. If you want to enjoy it with food, it could be something like agnolotti del plin (Piedmontese rabbit ravioli). Or maybe you head to your regular, beloved BYO catch-up with mates at the little Italian place down the road, where you’ll be the most popular person at the table when you unveil this bottle-aged stunner alongside the house bistecca. Buon appetito.

Themes of this wine

Nebbiolo

Nebbiolo is the great grape of Piedmont, responsible for both Barolo and Barbaresco, but it has also found an important place in Australia, especially in cooler elevated vineyard sites. One of the most distinctive grapes of them all, nebbiolo can achieve high ripeness while retaining lots of acidity. Unlike many grapes, the fruit doesn’t necessarily get sweeter and softer at higher ripeness, usually looking somewhat savoury with ample grippy tannins. Nebbiolo can vary from pretty expressions that emphasise red berries, cranberry, red currants, sour red cherries and the like and classic rose petal notes, while more serious examples will often look more savoury, with dried flowers and red fruit, and spices like star anise, as well as being very reflective of the soil, with dry-toned earthy and mineral notes.

Heathcote

Heathcote is rugged country, a tinder-dry landscape of rusty iron-rich soils littered with sculpturally stacked granitic boulders. It’s mythical territory, ancient land, and home to some of the world’s oldest viticultural soils. But as a wine region, it is a relatively young one, which saw an explosion of growth in the 90s. Shiraz led the charge, and it became Victoria’s answer to the Barossa or McLaren Vale, producing wines of significant power. But Heathcote is very different to both those places, and it is not that easily defined. Today, shiraz finds myriad expressions, and other varieties are taking a firm grip. The Heathcote wine region is largely celebrated for shiraz grown on its red Cambrian soil – indeed, it’s probably one of the few regions where those not completely obsessed with wine, or geology, could pin soil type to region. But scratch beneath that reputation and there’s real diversity at play: a number of notable vineyards in Heathcote are now defined by a swathe of alternative varieties, from Italian reds like nebbiolo and sangiovese to Rhône and Mediterranean whites – offering a glimpse of Australia’s wine future, with varieties that are heat- and drought-tolerant, and better suited to a warming climate.

Aged wine

There’s a particular kind of alchemy that happens to wine left to sit. Over years in the bottle, tannin molecules clump and soften, colour fades and mellows, and small amounts of oxygen slowly transform the wine’s aromas and flavours – primary fruit giving way to the deeper, earthier register of leather, dried herbs, forest floor and tar that only time can build. Catch a wine at exactly the right moment, and those tertiary characters sit in perfect balance with what’s left of its youth, creating a complexity no young wine can fake. It’s a genuine gamble – storage, cork integrity and sheer luck all play their part, which is why collectors like to say “there are no great wines, only great bottles” – but when it pays off, it offers something a fresh release simply can’t: a photograph of a particular vineyard, in a particular year, exactly as time has shaped it.