Keeping the Victorians Honest

Never before have I had enough to say on the topic to devote an entire article to pinot noir from South Australia. Fellow Victorians take obvious delight in the fact it has taken South Australians so long to make a decent pinot, but now I can name five of them. Stephen Henschke makes a rich wine from his family’s Lenswood property, Adam Wynn makes the most of his warmer site at Mountadam, Stephen George turned the corner at Ashton Hills in 1993 and Jeffrey Grosset has made an excellent wine from Adelaide Hills fruit.

From its charming location in the Adelaide Hills, Tim Knappstein’s Lenswood Pinot Noir has already assumed something of a cult following in the city of churches and Crows. Its 1993 release is the best South Australian pinot noir I have ever seen… perhaps even the best yet made outside Victoria! Knappstein’s success with the variety mirrors the modern professional approach to this most difficult of varieties. For starters, he tossed out three and a half vintages of the stuff before he was prepared to let one out under his name.

Tim Knappstein has little doubt that top Australian pinot noir will stand or fall on the quality of its site, something he acknowledges is easier in Victoria than in South Australia, as the multitude of top sites in the Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula, Geelong and Gippsland amply demonstrate.

He planted just a single acre of pinot noir at Lenswood as a trial. If it didn’t work out, a short appointment with a chainsaw and a hundred yards of grafting tape would soon turn it to chardonnay.

The first crop arrived in 1988, coinciding with the appearance at Knappstein’s winery with a French winemaker with Burgundian experience who was thrilled to be given responsibility for the paltry 1.2 tonnes. Knappstein recalls that he hardly slept for the next three days – pressing the grapes, retaining some stems, heating it up to 35oC and plunging the cap between nine and ten times each day.

‘On the fourth day he presented me with this murky-looking fluid which tasted so good we gave it the best oak we could find’, Knappstein remembers. ‘Later on we wrecked the most of the wine so we hardly bottled any of it, but we went out straight away and planted another eight acres of pinot.’

The next step was to get the viticulture correct, especially the fruit exposure and cropping levels. Like most other Australian entrants to the game of pinot noir, Knappstein commenced by treating it just like any other grape, cropping at higher levels and getting little back in terms of weight or flavour.

‘So we concluded that what everyone else was saying must be true. We began to regulate cropping, pruning and sunlight penetration. We started spraying for botrytis, which although you can’t always see, is usually there. In 1989 our pressings wine was actually lighter than the free run, so I assume botrytis had something to do with it’, he says.

Knappstein thinned his bunch number per vine from over fifty to twenty-five, retaining those buds nearest the base of the shoot and creating an even spread throughout the canopy. He estimates his yields are reduced from around five tonnes per acre to three and he’s not above thinning later if the crop appears to be heading above three again. He also manipulates shading with a mechanical leaf-plucker and has trellised all his pinot noir into vertical shoot positions.

It doesn’t sound cheap and it’s not. While he says he could crop sparkling base from the same vineyard at around 4-5 tonnes per acre at $1500 per tonne, there’s no market for Knappstein’s pinot noir for dry red at an equivalent $2500 per tonne. Ever wondered why there aren’t any good cheap pinot noirs?

Knappstein has chosen only two clones: the upright D5V12 which isn’t fashionable in Victoria and the industry-standard MV6. Knappstein likes his D5V12 for its lifted and attractive raspberry and strawberry fruit characters and its suppleness. He runs some juice off skins to keep its wine decently weighted. As one might expect, the MV6 develops more presence and tannin, with darker fruit characters.

Wary of the importance some attach to the Burgundian clones now appearing in Australia, Knappstein expects them to increase blending options for some makers, but doesn’t see them as a panacea for those caught between success and failure.

Once he’s brought his fruit to the winery, Knappstein indulges in different levels of whole fruit fermentation, enjoying the lift in perfume and semi-carbonic background it gives the wine, giving what he describes as a point of difference to the ‘serious’ Victorian pinots. He’ll keep different batches separate, usually with 0, 5, 30 and 100 per cent whole fruit.

Recognising that to make top pinot is very much a matter of increasing its complexity, Knappstein and his winemaker Steve Pannel endeavour never to repeat the same wine in a vintage, using different levels of whole berry fermentation, temperatures and sources of oak casks to impart their own distinctive characters.

Knappstein’s track record confirms he has ditched any pinot noir he hasn’t considered was up to it. His first release from Lenswood was half of the 1991 vintage, having turfed the entire crops from both 1989 and 1990. Only half of the 1992 made it to the bottle, but three quarters of the 1993 made the cut.

The Lenswood Vineyards pinot noirs are evolving into a style with sweet, lifted flavours and luscious, supple fruit as Knappstein looks for charm and fleshy textures. With each vintage he is seeking to build weight, tannins and staying power, while retaining the attractive qualities his vineyard seems clearly able to provide.

The 1991 wine is ripe and earthy, with spicy, gamey, cherry kernel and animal notes. It has a broad, rich palate with fine-grained tannins and is clearly made from very ripe fruit. Quite gamey and powerful, the 1992 vintage is an alcoholic spicy, herby wine with earthy, plummy and cinnamon flavours. The star is the 1993 – more floral and minty. A supple, fleshy wine, its sweet red berry flavours and tobacco match perfectly with its light spiciness, firm tannins and chocolatey, cedar oak.

Knappstein rates the 1994 as his best yet. Of the 600 tonnes crushed at his winery, he reckons that the 20 tonnes of Lenswood pinot noir received 20 of the entire winemaking effort. He’s created a totally separate area with seven small open fermenters for pinot and has even at his own cost for the Knappstein winery is part of the publicly floated Petaluma Ltd succumbed to the gentle caresses of a one-tonne hydraulic basket press bought for the exclusive use of the Lenswood pinot noir.

Although a relatively recent convert to the cause, Tim Knappstein feels he now has every reason in the book to argue the age-old case for pinot noir. Simply put, it goes that while there are indeed great wines and from time to time great cheap wines, there are simply no great cheap pinot noirs. Please login to post comment