Tasmanian Pinot Noir Lives up to its Promises

It’s been nearly two years since I’ve had a decent rave about pinot noir in these pages. In that time, hopes once dismissed as fanciful are being realised and flavours once regarded as impossible to achieve in Australian wine are being bottled. Pinot noir is on the march, not – never, in fact – in terms of quantity, but through its continual improvement and just by being one of the very best things around to drink.

Tasmania was always touted as the place most likely to impress with its pinot noir. It’s cooler, they said, more Burgundian in climate itself a debatable notion, Burgundy being much further that anywhere in Tasmania from a coastline and after all, isn’t coolness all that pinot noir needs? It’s that sort of logic that convinced some, I am sure, to dream of planting Macquarie Island with the stuff. However, it was towards Tasmania that many of our hopes were directed.

Despite the establishment of La Provence Vineyard at Lalla close to the Piper’s River area in Tasmania’s north-east in 1956 and the early plantings of Claude Alcorso at Moorilla Estate near Hobart two years later, it took a long time for Tasmanian pinot noir to reveal its true potential. Moorilla didn’t make pinot its prime concern until after its excellent 1984 wine, although thanks to some poor seasons, 1987 aside, we have had to wait until now for the results to shine through.

It could easily appear that although some lovely early wines were made by Moorilla, Piper’s Brook, Heemskerk, Rotherhythe and Marion’s Vineyard, Tasmania has given the mainland an unrecoverable headstart with pinot noir. Let’s face it, the largely Victorian wine regions of the Yarra Valley, Geelong, Gippsland and the Great Southern WA have a more stable, even climate – all-important when dealing with the world’s most finicky grape variety. They are generally better-equipped and have better access to qualified people experienced in the making of pinot.

For Tasmanians to make pinot noir well, they have needed to set up their vineyards with great precision, select the most suitable and sheltered sites, take extreme care not to over-crop and to allow the ripening grapes sufficient exposure. In its more marginal climate, it is natural that this has taken longer to work through. Fortunately, too, the arrival of skilled winemaker/ consultants like Andrew Hood has already lifted the standards of the tiny wineries unable to afford their own full-time winemaker.

A recent visit to the Apple Isle has convinced me beyond doubt that all Tasmania’s early potential with pinot noir is shortly to be realised. After that fine 1984 vintage Julian Alcorso, Claude’s son, set about restructuring the entire company towards the making of premium pinot noir. With the zeal of a man converted, Alcorso bet heavily on the variety, committing around 70 of the 28 hectares of vineyards now available to him some owned, some contracted to pinot. The standard pinot noir crush at Moorilla is now around 75-80 tonnes, making it clearly the most committed producer of quality pinot noir in Australia.

It’s worth noting, too, that Moorilla has only a single label, although rumblings about a ‘Reserve’ wine have been detected as far away as Melbourne. Presently, then, apart from wine not suited to the Moorilla style which is discarded and sold to others, it all ends up as Moorilla Estate Pinot Noir. For the time being at least, Julian Alcorso doesn’t favour the concept of a second wine label, such as Pipers Brook’s ‘Tasmania Wine Company’, for Moorilla Estate.

Although Moorilla’s 1990 pinot is a lighter style, it reveals attractive cherry-plum fruit, some richness and hints of tobacco and leather. The best is certainly still to come. Tasted from barrel, the components of the 1991 wine I saw, still separate in oaks of different forests and ages, suggested real power and class. And the 1992 wine, still recovering from a secondary fermentation, already shows the depth and breeding of top pinot noir, from whatever continent you care to choose. I have fond memories of the 1987 Moorilla Estate, somehow simultaneously elegant and opulent, but expect them shortly to be eclipsed as these new wines find their way into circulation.

Pipers Brook, now comfortably housed in its stunningly airy new winery at Pipers River, has been another torch-bearer for Tasmanian pinot noir. In its best years Pipers Brook makes a rich, concentrated pinot of plum and cherry-like fruit, classically velvet-soft tannins, great length and elegance, the sort of wines that would stand up anywhere. The 1991, again tasted before bottling, is another such wine, with huge complexity, flavours of cinnamon and rhubarb, and the perfume of roses.

Heemskerk is the last of the ‘big three’ Tasmanian wineries. Half owned by the French champagne house of Louis Roederer, its winemaker is the young French-born and trained Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon. Convinced that pinot noir, like chardonnay, is a variety to be protected and ‘built up’ in the winery, he has a stunning 1990 wine in the Heemskerk cellar, an even better pinot noir than the popular 1989 vintage presently for sale. The 1990 Heemskerk Pinot Noir, from a warm year, is a pungent, gamey wine with underlying flavours of dark cherries and lightly-charred oak. It has both structure and finesse and could re-shape our thinking towards the whole phenomenon of Tasmanian pinot noir.

Tasmania, then, is poised to pounce with its pinot. It already boasts the country’s largest producer of quality pinot noir dry red and two other serious producers in Heemskerk and Pipers Brook. Each has the resources, the understanding and the experience to excel as regularly as anyone else is likely to with the pinot grape, loved and hated by those who make it. The state also boasts a secondary echelon of pinot makers, such as Delamere, St Matthias, Buchanan and Freycinet, which as time progresses, will hopefully take the strides that the three large makers have made over the last fifteen years. Please login to post comment