Andrew Hood

The best thing that could happen to a newly emergent wine region would be to have someone like Andrew Hood turn up on its doorstep. For the greatest impediment to the establishment of a new region is rarely money or ambition, foresight or dedication. It’s usually expertise.

It’s beyond argument that most new wine areas take several years longer than they should to achieve a spread of wines from a range of varieties that are well made, technically sound and interesting to drink. For despite the eloquence with which one might persuade a jury or a judge, the precision with which one may repair a cardiac artery, or the bullish self-confidence and infallibility with which one can inflate a share portfolio, one simply can’t walk straight into unchartered viticultural territory and make of oneself a wine superstar overnight. Especially in a marginal, cool climate like Tasmania.

Andrew Hood is one of the clear reasons why we can clearly see a bright viticultural future for southern and eastern Tasmania and where that future might lie. To the vineyards for which he presently makes wine, the poultice of brands whose reputations he initially established, the umpteen others he has on his waiting list and the countless new vineyards whose owners are still to arrive at the conclusion that they need professional help, Andrew Hood must appear as a friendly and cooperative force whose intelligence and power enables others less blessed in oenological expertise and resources to fulfil their ambitions in wine.

At his small winery near Cambridge between Hobart and Sorell, Hood makes about eighty wines each year for around thirty vineyards. He’s been doing this sort of thing since 1990, building his own facility in time for the 1994 vintage. Some of his clients are so small that Hood is required to make batches of only 500 litres in volume, about fifty-five cases of wine. Others, by contrast, are a comparatively Jacobs Creek-like 12,000 litres, topping in around 1300 cases. Some of these vineyards are hardly known outside their owners’ circle of friends. Others, relatively small as they may be on a national scale, are distributed widely and are fiercely sought after by those in the know, especially Meadowbank, Spring Vale, Elsewhere, Winstead and Providence.

Add to these Hood’s own first-class label of Wellington plus names like Notely Gorge, Apsley Gorge, Glen Othy and Lalla Gully whose wines his abilities put on the map and it’s hard to find an individual who has had a greater spread of positive influence in Tasmanian wine.

A native Tasmanian, Andrew Hood had carved out quite a career firstly as a wine scientist then as a wine educator at tertiary level, teaching at what has now become the Wagga Wagga campus of the Charles Sturt University. Originally a microbiologist, he broadened his teaching base to become more involved in most aspects of wine production.

As a winemaker today Andrew Hood remains very much the scientist and technician, firmly convinced that if you have good fruit at your disposal, you don’t need to ‘do anything special’ in the winery. Forty percent of the fruit he processes is pinot noir and he makes around thirty different pinots each vintage. How many other winemakers get to do that?

If you have good fruit, he argues, pinot is not a difficult variety to make. He is a little dismissive of the ‘cliched business of the heartbreak variety’ which he belives ‘happens when the fruit is not grown in right areas, so you have to push and shove to make it produce anything decent’. While other winemakers may not entirely agree, he has made more decent pinot noirs, albeit in very small volumes, than most pinot specialists in this country. ‘By far the most important influence is fruit ripeness which varies from area to area. I don’t see hugely strong regional influences that are not explainable this way’, he says.

Although he makes more chardonnay than riesling, it is with this latter grape that Andrew Hood is really threatening the thunder of some of Australia’s better-known riesling regions. Aiming to make steely, slow developing styles with a ‘finer,more European and floral range of flavours than found in mainland wines’, he’s succeeded wonderfully with the wines of Winstead and Wellington, especially with Wellington’s delicious ‘Iced’ dessert variant.

It will take time before Andrew Hood’s ongoing contribution to Tasmanian wine ripples throughout the broader Australian wine community, but his quietly spoken and almost retiring approach is no reason why it shouldn’t be recognised by a nomination of this nature. Anyone seriously interested in the wines of Tasmania, one of our very few genuine viticultural frontiers, has much to thank him for. Please login to post comment