David Traeger

Early in 1995 David Traeger is not a well-known name in Australian wine. Some of those most in touch with the industry associate his name firstly with his long stint at Mitchelton with Don Lewis, secondly as a somewhat elusive maker of distinctive central Victorian wines sold under a variety of small labels, one of which is his own.

It’s my bet that the stamp and stature of the new David Traeger wines, each the result of skilled and crafted making, will soon put his name on the map once, finally and for all.

The more you learn about Australian wine, the harder it is to find its true artisans. Our reputation is built fairly and squarely on fruit-driven styles from warm areas, where flavour, consistency and price create the winning formula. To my mind, David Traeger is one of the few individuals, who like Peter Edwards of The McAlister, Gary Farr at Bannockburn and Vanya Cullen at Cullens, looks beyond the readily apparent to create wines of rare composition and interest.

Traeger’s approach is to look at the minutiae which create a wine that is complete and complex, but not dominated by any single character. His approach is utterly traditional – to direct his focus towards the vineyard.

‘I’m not afraid to blend’, he declares. ‘I’ve no qualms about taking the best fruit I can get and blending from area to area or from vineyard to vineyard in the same area. It helps create consistency between vintages, not so much to create the same style from year to year, but so consumers can be confident in a wine’s consistency of quality and its broad level of fruit intensity.’

Some seasons are so difficult that even if you’ve a number of diverse vineyards to take fruit from, still you can’t cover enough bets with the chips in your hand, exactly like a game of roulette. Although he reckons he may have been a little hard on himself for not releasing a shiraz every year since his first 1988, for it certainly hits the winemaker’s hip pocket to reject anything, Traeger is adamant that if a young wine isn’t up to scratch it won’t wear his brand. To date he has released only the even years.

‘My main goal was to make cabernet sauvignon’, he says. ‘At Mitchelton we never paid much attention to shiraz, but after taking fruit from Chateau Tahbilk for a few years we came around. I firmly believe that the Grampians, Avoca and the Goulburn are premium areas for distinctive Australian shiraz, something really different.’

As the current 1992 David Traeger Shiraz reveals, his shirazes epitomise the strengths and characteristics of the old dryland vineyards of the different sub-regions of the Goulburn Valley. To him the Goulburn influence is rich, generous and intense, rather than the restrained, peppery and austere style further west in the state. Traeger sources his shiraz from six different vineyards, but only three or four make the final blend. Two are in Nagambie, one in Graytown, while small components come from Heathcote and Bendigo.

‘It’s amazing that a little area of Victoria around Graytown, halfway between Heathcote and Nagambie, has the same heat summation as Coonawarra. It’s cooler than Nagambie and even gets frosted.’

Although Traeger’s Nagambie shiraz is slowly being decimated by phylloxera, for it was never planted on rootstocks, it produces ‘sweeter, better fruit, with more sweet flavours in the nose’, at low yields of around 1.0 to 1.5 tonnes per acre. The vines are on deep red brown loams.
The Graytown fruit is bigger, with good mouthfilling tannins. Traeger’s shiraz vines at Graytown are between 25 and 30 years old and sited on old creek flats. They contributed to the intense tannin structure and weight of the David Traeger Shiraz.

Traeger recently purchased the old Walkershire vineyard at Nagambie, planted to 100 year old dryland shiraz which floods annually. He’s sourced from it for a few years, but says that most of its fruit has been earmarked for a forthcoming ‘super-premium’ blend, due for release sometime towards the end of this decade.

Traeger fashions his Cabernet towards a restrained, medium weight and slightly more herbaceous style. He doesn’t want it as ripe as his shiraz, but to look relatively closed while young, needing time in the bottle.

Most of the fruit comes off a couple of Goulburn vineyards, which he blends with cabernet franc and merlot, plus some cabernet from the King Valley. Traeger looks to combine the intense, ripe blackcurrant flavours of the small cabernet berries from the local old dryland vineyards with more straightforward, medium-weight and aromatic King Valley cabernet. Unusually, Traeger uses cabernet franc to contribute further weight and tannin.

Traeger takes merlot from a couple of smaller vineyards in the Strathbogie ranges, employing its sweeter, fleshier palate and its complementary aromas and flavours. ‘Australians are still some way from understanding merlot and getting it sorted out’, he says. ‘At present the triple blends appear more interesting to the market, but the public’s perception could be ahead of wine quality’, he suggests.

David Traeger’s 1992 reds, plus an intensely-flavoured and lightly-oaked Verdelho from 1994, are all currently available. Please login to post comment