I’m at the end of a day in Heathcote, Victoria, and the last stop is calling into the M.Chapoutier winery to have a chat to Steve Oates, the Winery Operations Manager.
Steve Oates: One of the first things Michel did was sack his father, because his father was a crap winemaker! He, around that time, started looking into organic farm practices because he felt it was important that we look after what we’re taking from. He started going organic over there, and then began coming to Australia in the late ‘90s once he was happy with how things were going at home. One of the things that fascinated him with Australia were the old soils that we have. And the fact that we don’t have the rules that they have. We can plant what we want, where we want, call it what we want and sell it for what we want. That was perhaps the biggest driver for him.
Initially they set up a winery just out of Robe in South Australia, then came here and developed a rapport with Ron Laughton as they had a similar approach to winemaking. Out of that came a partnership called Cambrian, named after the era that the soils are from. Then a wine called ‘La Pleiade’ it is a constellation that you can see from both Heathcote and Tarn. He was very big, in the early days, on doing joint ventures – mostly where they grew the grapes but we made the wine. He had a fascination with what different varietals could do in different soils. Trying, pushing and experimenting. Then they bought three vineyards in the Pyrenees, about three hours away.
Our Australian range is called ‘Tournon’ which is a town across the river from the winery in Tarn. We have Heathcote – an organic Shiraz vineyard about 15kms from here at Ladies Pass. We have the joint venture with Ron, which is coming to an end after 20 years. And we have a partnership with an Italian-American family called the Terlatos, where together they own the Malakoff Vineyard in the southernmost part of the Pyrenees, near Landsborough. We also have our white label range – Mathilda – which are really good bang for buck, but we sometimes source the fruit. We produce up to 20 wines.
WF: What varietals do you have access to?
SO: At the Malakoff we’ve got Riesling, Viognier, Chardonnay, Grenache, Touriga, Sangiovese, Cabernet and Shiraz. And then we have our range of wines from France and Spain. We’ve got wineries in Provence and Burgundy, and a relationship with the Rothschilds which means we’ve got Champagne. So there’s a lot going on. We only have a small sales team here – two in Victoria, two in Sydney.
WF: I drove past Ladies Mile earlier today
SO: At our Ladies Mile site there’s no infrastructure – just equipment and vines. In 2019 there was a fire, and they got ten tonnes off it maybe? In 2020 there was 500 kilos. In 2021 there was one barrel. In 2022 we got 12 tonnes and it was the best wine in the winery. And this year it did get mildew, but pretty much everyone in this part of the world got mildew. But we got 10.4 tonnes off it. If you go back to the early 2000’s it’s literally like this. But it hadn’t been pruned properly for five years.
WF: Is the season going OK? There’s been a bit of rain I hear?
SO: We’ve been picking this year for 20 days, so it’s a really compressed season. In 2003 this place was built as a 50-tonne winery – I only have capacity to ferment about 80 tonnes at once. When I started they said to me “It’s timing. This will ripen, two weeks later this comes off, somewhere in there that will come off, and then that’ll be finished, that’ll be finished and that will start”. Hasn’t happened once. And it’s getting worse. So it does make it logistically very difficult. In 2021 we hired in two 24,000 lites ISO tanks. Everything is a logistics exercise because we don’t have enough space. Finished wine is stored at another site for example.
We’ve got bigger tanks out here for blending – we just sent 30,000 litres of Shiraz off Malakoff for bottling, yesterday. We also bottled our premium wines – Selection Parcels 2021 – about a month ago. We wanted to bring the bottling of a few wines forward this year. Getting harvesters now is really difficult. We might say we want it picked on Wednesday, and they’ll go ‘Nah – you can have Friday or Monday’. It’s frustrating because you’ll have pressure on you from weather. And just to throw something else into the mix this year, the Fire Authority decided that they needed to do a planned burn along the verge near our vineyard – 80 metres away. We said can you put it back 3-4 weeks, we’ve got 80 tonnes of fruit out there we’re about to harvest? So we’re all a bit tense over that. I should get the last 18-20 tonnes on Friday. Just another challenge for this year.
WF: Do you have anything in barrel that we could try?
SO: Let’s try the Chardonnay that came in from Landsborough about two weeks ago – it’s just finished. This is Pyrenees Chardonnay, but there’s not much in Heathcote – Sanguine do one. This is one of the most popular wines that we do. The last couple of years we haven’t got as much as we’d like as parts of the block are disease-prone.
WF: Lots of new oak in that, and a lovely peach character. And a pithy, almond. High solids.
SO: Yes, that one in particular is a brand new barrel, with the free-run juice in it. This one has the pressings in it separately. I’ll do some battonage on it once it has settles. We’ll stir it about once a fortnight. These are typically in oak now and will come out in December, then get bottled in February. The ’22 was bottled in February and we’ll try that.
WF: Do you have any specific challenges to face, with being part of a French company?
SO: 2021 was a really good year – we were meant to do 100 tonnes, and we did 225. One of the sales reps from Melbourne came up for six weeks, but he couldn’t use a forklift, so I still had to unload every truck, load every bin, as well as do everything else. So it was a good learning curve and we made some really good wines. Before COVID there used to be a role in the company, like a flying winemaker, and they would look after all the non-Rhone wineries. So, come out here for 3 months and do all the correspondence back to France. I now report to Max, and Clement who is the Chief Winemaker and we have Zoom meetings. It’s always that one of us is having a coffee and the other is having a glass of wine.
WF: And what about things closer to home?
SO: After 2021 we agreed to try and sell a lot more. When i got here there were a lot of wines from 2018, ’19 and ’20 that we had to find a home for. We’ve a had a good run with tenders for Emirates Airlines. One came back in about October 2021 – for about 120,000 litres of Victorian Shiraz. But I then came back in January to an email that said “You’ve got the tender but we need 180,000 litres, not 120,000”. I think we emptied 13 tanks in four days! I had worked with Vincent at Mitchelton, and he could see what they had in their backyard, but also, for me, I had 4000 litres of Grenache, 4000 litres of Cabernet, 10,000 litres of this, 8000 litres of that… and it all disappeared out the driveway in the back of a tanker. A whole lot of problems solved.
For example in 2021 we had to say “Guys, stop picking, because we’re full”. And I don’t want to have to say that. We got away with it, and it was only a couple of days. We like to keep things on skins for a long time – because that’s the french way. They like four to five weeks. We’re allowed to make one wine the modern, Australian way. I’ll show you that because we just bottled it. And in ’21 it was the best wine in the winery. We created a new Limited Release Reserve product from it. We did one again in ’22 and we’ll do one in ‘23 as well. In the Vineyard Manager’s eyes, that’s the best block – it is Shay’s Flat Block A3 Shiraz. It’s nice to have the freedom to do some things like that, having earned their trust over the last couple of years.
WF: How do you find working in Heathcote?
SO: I’ve been here twelve years. I lowered the average age by ten years! I’ve been in hospitality, wine and food all my life. I trained in Switzerland in all the old school way of doing things. Spent 25 years in Sales and Marketing for wineries. I was Estate Manager for De Bortoli wines in Queensland. But I was born in Victoria – I went to Yarra Grammar School – and I wanted to come back and be closer to family. So I moved here and I said to someone “Where’s the best place to eat?” And they said “The BP is better than the Caltex”.
But now we have Chauncey Restaurant, which is the brainchild of Ron Laughton. They bought that the year I moved here in 2011. They do a four course set menu for $95, and the food is beautiful. An amazing wine list, and I think for $85 you can get two matching wines for each course. Unfortunately a lot of the locals don’t get it. They think the winery people are rich, and don’t realise we’re just farmers like everybody else. It’s an older, and quite wealthy population. Heathcote has a hospital yet is a small town. Normally a small town like this wouldn’t have a hospital.
I spent six years in Cellar Doors here before I made the jump across. Because I had the experience, I kept getting Cellar Door Manager and Marketing jobs. “Can you come and do what you did for them, for us” type of conversations. I ran the Wine Hub when it was up the road, and we won ‘Best Independent Bottle Shop in Australia’. So I’ve come here via a different path.
WF: Often that’s the best way.
SO: Yeah, because you don’t have a pre-conditioned way of thinking. I’ve always been around it. I was up at Ladies Pass last week, and at 7am discovered the tractor wouldn’t come out of gear. So I went next door to Mario and asked if I could borrow his tractor for 12 hours!
WF: I was there last night.
SO: He was working for Jasper Hill, and Mario set up the vineyard that we bought. He found some old maps from 2004 of what they’d planted in what rows. Back in the gold rush days when there was 45,000 people in Heathcote – where the vineyard is was the main route to Echuca and the Bush Rangers used to hang out there and rob the stagecoaches. But they’d let the ladies pass. Up there are five vineyards in a row – all on the Eastern slope. Ours is quite a breezy block. You go a bit further up and there are some on the Western slope. The fruit there tends to be a bit cooked because it does get extra heat. I’ve judged at the Heathcote Wine Show a few times. You can taste it.
We move into the Cellar Door area, and start to taste, and we start with a couple of whites – a Riesling and a Chardonnay.
WF: Is there much Riesling around here?
SO: Well, this Riesling is from Pyrenees. Jasper Hill do a Riesling. Tellurian up at Mt Camel do Riesling, and that is one I would rate. They do TWB – Tellurian White Blend which is a white Rhône style.
With the Chardonnay, last year there was two puncheons of old oak, one barrique of old oak and four hogsheads of new oak. We are doing it in a bit of a bigger style than a lot of people, but it is pretty young – it only got bottled a few weeks ago. And I think we can quickly skirt forward to Shiraz can’t we? This is the A3 that we talked about earlier – out of bottle, from one barrel.
WF: Oh yes – that’s got a nice elegance, and peppery, savoury characters. Can I quickly ask – what is your favourite of the French Chapoutier wines – because we do see a few of those in New Zealand, through Eurovintage?
SO: I don’t really get the chance to taste a lot of it. Me and time are not friends – I don’t seem to have any down time. I haven’t had the opportunity to go through the really high-end stuff. I like the L’Ermite for example. I’m a big fan of Marsanne and I really like the Chanté Alouette, and I also really like some of the Grenache blends. I do struggle to keep up with what they’re up to over there because I’m flat out in my own world.
This is ‘Ergo Sum’ – a joint venture we did with Rick from Giaconda. It’s all Rick’s Beechworth fruit, and the last vintage was 2018. It was before my time, and there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know!
WF: Well, that’s officially quite good. I’m a fan of that. One last thing, and I know it’s not on these labels for the collaborations, but can you tell me about the Braille on the Chapoutier labels?
SO: It was when Michel was slowly taking over the company, and it had been happening for the last few years. There was a family that had been growing for them close to a generation. There son who was born blind, and they went to the Chapoutiers and said “We are going to move to the city so that he gets the help he needs – would you please consider buying the vineyard?”. And Michel’s father said he would, and bought the vineyard. Fast forward thirty years, and that man invented Braille (along with someone else). When Michel heard this, he put Braille on all of our labels. It’s a cool story.
