2022 Fighting Gully Road Tempranillo Beechworth

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From one of Australia’s great viticultural pioneers of alternative varieties comes an incredibly composed tempranillo with serious winemaking detail – and, in the eyes of some judges, Australia’s best example of the variety.

Producer
Fighting Gully Road
Region

Beechworth
RRP

$45
Vintage

2022
Variety/Varieties

Tempranilo
Alc./Vol.

14%

Juicy blueberry and redcurrant fruit, wrapped up in leather and earthy spice. There’s a smoky, savoury thread – think dried fig and warm spice – with fine, grippy tannins and real character. A well-balanced red with plenty going on.

Mark Walpole doesn’t do things by halves. He spent two decades at Brown Brothers, working his way up to Chief Viticulturist, and it was during that time – in 1995 – that he first purchased the Beechworth escarpment land that would become Fighting Gully Road, planting it out gradually over the following years. He also co-founded the notable Greenstone Vineyard in Heathcote before eventually leaving Brown Brothers in 2007 to focus on his own projects. Fighting Gully Road, now a 12-hectare site at 550 metres, is built on quiet experimentation rather than fashion: cabernet and pinot noir gave way over the years to sangiovese, tempranillo, chardonnay, verdicchio and grenache, each shift a considered response to what the land was telling him. That patient, methodical approach recently earned Fighting Gully Road the Innovative Vineyard of the Year award – “The Groundbreaker” – at our Fifth Annual Vineyard of the Year Awards, recognition of a career spent quietly pushing Australian viticulture forward.

Tempranillo is one of Spain’s noblest grapes, the backbone of Rioja and Ribera del Duero, prized for its structure, its savoury depth and its knack for translating site with real clarity. At Fighting Gully Road, it’s grown on a north-facing slope of Ordovician mudstone that runs warm by Beechworth’s standards, tempered by constant wind and low humidity that keep the vines in check – restricting berry size, concentrating flavour and colour, and building real natural tannin. It’s a site that leaves its mark, and this tempranillo carries that structure through into a serious, savoury wine.

That structure is then handled with real winemaking intent. A judiciously approach through oak maturation has complemented the wine with a gorgeous savoury complexity – the sarsaparilla, bitter cola, cacao and meaty notes that mark this as a genuinely serious drop, rather than simple varietal fruit. It’s the hand of a winemaker unwilling to let the variety coast on charm alone, pushing instead for real depth and detail. The result is a wine that pairs a leading vigneron’s decades of site knowledge with a genuinely considered approach in the winery – and it shows in every glass.

Tasting note

A brooding and nuanced Tempranillo with a deep pulse of blueberry and redcurrant fruit wrapped in leather, earth and violet perfume. Savoury, with sarsaparilla, bitter cola, cacao and meaty characters leading the way – dark, insistent and almost difficult to read at first, but magnetic in its demand for a second look. With air, it finds new shape: dried fig, clove, dark soda spice and a gravelly, earthy line sit beneath the savoury weight, while a smoked-kransky edge adds a comforting depth. The palate has a ferrous undertow that gives the fruit real seriousness, florals lifting the darker tones and keeping it from turning heavy. Fruit, acid and savoury depth sit in good proportion – dark and umami-driven, with enough freshness to stay light on its feet. Chinotto, cured meat and old-wood spice carry through a clipped, savoury finish. There’s structure, there’s grip, and there’s genuine detail – a composed, earthy expression that feels both distinctly Australian and unmistakably tempranillo.

When to drink

Perfect for sipping with friends by an open fire on a cold night, spinning tall tales late into the evening – if you have to have food with it, think something like slow-cooked beef cheeks in a Pedro Ximenez glaze, keeping everyone at the table a little longer. Or it’s one of those crisp nights when you’ve got a lamb shoulder in the oven and this sleek, smoky red being nursed in your glass. You’re in no rush, so steal another sip while sunlight fades to the evening’s first stars. Feels good.

Themes of this wine

Tempranillo

Tempranillo is unarguably Spain’s most recognisable variety, forming the bedrock of that country’s most famous red wines, as well as being one of one of the five key grapes from Portugal’s emblematic fortified – Port. In Australia, it has made a meaningful mark, but with limited genetic vine material, the potential for the grape is exponentially bigger, and with new clones now online that potential is starting to be fulfilled. The flavours of tempranillo naturally vary depending on ripeness, both red and darker fruits are common, with plum, blackberry and cherry common descriptors. Those fruit flavours are typically accompanied by savoury notes, often leather, tobacco, woodsy herbs and spice notes, with cola as another notable descriptor. While the acidity is naturally low, cooler examples will have good freshness and the wines will typically have ample structure from savoury tannins

Beechworth

Beechworth is one of Victoria’s great high-country wine regions, its vineyards scattered across granite and mudstone slopes at elevations that rank among the highest in mainland Australia. Gold-rush history runs deep here, but today it’s better known for elevation-driven cool-climate wines, with chardonnay and shiraz carrying its early reputation before a wave of alternative varieties – sangiovese, tempranillo, nebbiolo and more – began to reveal the region’s real diversity. Beechworth’s defining feature is its site variability: granite here, mudstone and shale there, north-facing warmth in one pocket and cooler, wind-swept exposure in the next, meaning the region resists easy definition and rewards winemakers willing to dig into the detail of a particular slope. It’s a small, quietly serious region – driven less by scale than by a handful of dedicated, site-obsessed producers pushing Victorian wine into increasingly interesting territory.

Explore Further

Deep Dive

Australia’s Best Tempranillo

Tempranillo is unarguably Spain’s most recognisable variety, forming the bedrock of its most famous red wines. It’s also a variety that has seen recently seen explosive global growth, with more hectares of tempranillo vines planted since 2000 than any other variety, and by a big margin. In Australia, it has made a meaningful mark – and with plantings increasing and a host of new producers working with the variety, there’s a palpable sense that it’s poised to become our next mainstream red wine variety. But what does, or should, Australian tempranillo taste like? And is it as well suited to Australia’s climatic conditions as we’d like to think? Two years after our last Deep Dive on the topic, we thought it was an apt time to come to grips with how this Spanish icon is faring in Australian soil …

Vineyard profile

Fighting Gully Road Vineyard, Beechworth

Perched at 550 meters elevation in Beechworth, Fighting Gully Road spans 12 hectares, tended to by visionary vigneron Mark Walpole. This windy, low-humidity site has evolved from 1997 through to 2019 and is now planted to sangiovese, tempranillo, chardonnay, verdicchio, and grenache. Walpole’s low-input approach blends pragmatism with sustainability: cane pruning for longevity, drip irrigation as needed, and a permanent sward of clovers and grasses to boost biodiversity. Wines grown in this vineyard include Fighting Gully Road’s Sangiovese, Chardonnay, Tempranillo, Syrah, Grenache, Verdicchio, Gros Manseng, and Rosé bottlings, while a portion of the tempranillo is sold to winemaker Adrian Rodda for his Aquila Audaux Tempranillo. The x-factor here lies in the vineyard’s north-east slope, with a microclimate of cooler days and warmer nights alongside a unique geology offering Walpole a brilliant canvas on which to paint his own take on Beechworth.

Awards

Fifth Annual Vineyard of the Year Awards Winners

The Vineyard of the Year Awards in 2019 in order to place vineyards and griowers across the nation at the heart of the Australian wine story – and at the heart of the Australian wine community. We wanted to reconnect the whole idea of wine to the place it comes from and the manner in which the grapes are grown. Five years on, and the mission of the Vineyard of the Year Awards remains the same. Read on to discover the New Vineyard of the Year; Old Vineyard of the Year; Innovative Vineyard of the Year, dubbed ‘The Groundbreaker’; and Vineyard of the Year.