Finalists for the Qantas Wine Magazine Winemaker of the Year 2001

Stuart Anderson

Founder of one of Victoria’s most important vineyards in Balgownie, Stuart Anderson today divides his time between playing the piano and the bassoon, racing vintage Bugattis and acting as a very hands-on winemaking consultant to some emergent vineyards of exceptional quality. A former chemist in Bendigo, Anderson still travels to Burgundy each year to make wine, despite now being the less impetuous side of his seventieth birthday. His signature wines were the long-living Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon from Balgownie, while today they are the pinot noirs and chardonnays from Mount Gisborne, Epis and Bindi, each of which are small specialist operations in the Macedon Ranges. None of Anderon’s wines show the faintest trace of excessive artefact or over-processing. Each naturally and clearly express their vineyards and vintages.

Gary Baldwin

Gary Baldwin is a founding partner of Wine Network Australia Winenet, the country’s largest technical winemaking and viticultural consultancy, which works in the areas of winery design and construction, winemaking, viticulture and business planning for wine companies. He’s also a prominent and highly rated judge at wine shows. Although he freely admits that like most consultants, the better he works the more likely he is to do himself out of a job, Baldwin has been an integral part of the success of some of Australia’s best-know and emergent wine labels, including Dalwhinnie, Stoniers, Arthurs Creek Estate and Massoni in Victoria, Devil’s Lair, Voyager Estate, Brookland Valley and Lenton Brae in Western Australia and Freycinet in Tasmania.

Nigel Dolan

When Nigel Dolan left his senior post at Seppeltsfield just after the 1992 vintage to join Saltram, he attracted the same sort of headline space that Adam Gilchrist might today generate if he suddenly decided to don the gloves for New Zealand. He’s since become Group Red Winemaker for Beringer Blass’ Australian operations, and has been instrumental in remarkable improvements in the standards of the Saltram, Mamre Brook and Stonyfell Metala labels. Born in the house in which he presently lives, the historic Mamre Brook homestead at Saltram, Dolan’s father was Bryan ‘Skip’ Dolan, a former Saltram credited with the first vintage of a wine very close to his son’s heart, the Stonyfell Metala.


John Duval

John Duval is only the third winemaker with responsibility for Australia’s most famous wine, Penfolds Grange. As such, he follows in the footsteps Max Schubert 1948-1975 and Don Ditter 1975-1986. For a winemaker of his experience, it’s unusual that Duval has had but the one employer, for whom his influence extends far beyond its flagship wine. Duval is the key man and custodian of the intricate Penfolds hierarchy of red wines, a range totally without peer in the world for its adherence to company philosophy and style, quality and consistency. He is due some credit for the appearance and evolution of the Penfolds white standard-bearer, the Yattarna chardonnay, and was instrumental behind the appearance of its sought-after new red release, the RWT Barossa shiraz, a real break in Penfolds’ tradition.

Gary Farr

Nobody in Australia has consistently been making world-class wines from both chardonnay and pinot noir for longer than Gary Farr, winemaker for the highly-rated Bannockburn winery near Geelong in Victoria. Nobody in Australian wine sets himself higher standards to achieve than Farr, and he expects to achieve them, year in, year out. Farr’s goal is simply to make wine that he enjoys drinking. If you happen to enjoy it as well, all the better, but he won’t lose sleep if you don’t. His wines are strongly influenced by his winemaking activities with some of the more individual and self-confident winemakers in Burgundy. Is he trying to ape their wines? ‘We make good Bannockburn; they make good Burgundy’, he says. Not unsurprisingly, Bannockburn’s wines tend to sell out pretty fast. The jewel in their crown can occasionally be a very Francophilic shiraz.


Joe Grilli

There’s no more innovative winemaker in Australia than Joe Grilli, winemaker and manager of his family’s Primo Estate on the Adelaide Plains. To make an elegant cool-climate cabernet sauvignon from his hot home vineyard he pruned its first crop onto the ground and waited for a second crop some months later. To make luscious botrytis-affected riesling he would harvest it and then spray on the botrytis, making the wine some weeks later. To reproduce the style and structure of some of his favourite Italian reds in Australia he was the first to harvest the grapes, before letting them dry out a little in ‘amarone’ fashion before turning them into wine. To make a complex, unusually mature sparkling red he makes a base wine of old reds and vintage ports he buys in bottle at auction. He’s now blending shiraz with sangiovese and selling it in Italy and making a wine from columbard that is substantially better than it is ever supposed to be. What on earth will he try next?

Clare Halloran

If it daunted Clare Halloran in 1997 to assume winemaking and viticultural responsibilities for one of Victoria’s highest profile wineries at the tender age of 31, it certainly didn’t show. In fact, TarraWarra has never been in safer hands. When promoted she had already been assistant winemaker at TarraWarra for a year, prior to which she had held a similar position at T’Gallant on the Mornington Peninsula. A former physical education teacher, Halloran has overseen the transition of the company’s second label to the new Tin Cows brand, but most importantly has fulfilled the vineyard’s early potential with its premier Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. She has reworked the vineyard to improve fruit exposure and cropping levels, and has simplified the techniques used to make the Pinot Noir by going back to a gentle and traditional Burgundian approach. The exceptional quality of TarraWarra’s 1998 vintage is really just an indication of what Clare Halloran may achieve once she’s been given further opportunity to refine her approach.


Stephen Pannell

One of the most influential large company winemakers in Australia is also one of our youngest. At 34 years of age Steve Pannell is mounting the corporate ladder at BRL Hardy so fast they’re going to need several extensions if he’s to last there much longer. He’s fated to fill much the same sort of role that Philip Shaw performs at Southcorp/Rosemount, using a sharp palate and sense of wine style with an ability to communicate his ideas and enthusiasm to the red winemaking team he heads at BRL. He’s been instrumental in the successful Tintara red wines, the revitalised premium Reynell label, the recent form of Yarra Burn Pinot Noir and the return to top drawer of the company’s premium Eileen Hardy Shiraz, with which he collected a Jimmy Watson for the 1995 vintage.

Iain Riggs

Iain Riggs has helped to redefine the qualities inherent in the Hunter Valley’s classic white variety of semillon and has created an icon from its red counterpart of shiraz. He’s also taken Brokenwood from being a small cliquey winery into a substantial and growing business with assets in South Australia and Victoria. Riggs makes two different Hunter semillons, one being up-front, herbaceous and approachable, the ILR Reserve being the other, a classic long-term wine which peaks between five and twelve years of age. Brokenwood’s signature wine is its Graveyard shiraz, a riper, oakier Hunter shiraz whose intense flavours belie its restraint and fine texture. Convinced that the Hunter doesn’t ‘grow decent floral varieties’ like cabernet, riesling, traminer and pinot, Riggs has added key red McLaren Vale vineyards and the Yarra Valley’s Seville Estate to Brokenwood’s portfolio. In his free time Riggs is also a board member of the Winemakers Federation of Australia and Deputy Chair of Wine Australia since its inception. He’s also in high demand locally and internationally as a wine judge.

Andrew Wigan

When you work for a company whose name and profile are inextricably linked to somebody as larger than life as Peter Lehmann, you shouldn’t expect too much attention. One of the good things about Andrew Wigan is that he doesn’t. He began as Lehmann’s right hand man at Saltram in 1976 and when Lehmann decided to form his own business, was only too happy to follow. Since that time Wigan has been a key figure behind the Peter Lehmann brand’s increasing recognition as one of Australia’s most consistent makers of quality wine at several different price-points. Propelled under the spotlight by two excellent flagship red wines under the Stonewell and Mentor labels from the exceptionally difficult 1989 vintage, Wigan is now rightly considered a consummate maker of Barossa red and white wines and Eden Valley riesling. His hallmarks are generosity and flavour, plus an approachability almost irrespective of age. Please login to post comment