The Blue Pyrenees Estate

Winemaking and marketing innovations come and go but rarely do they coincide. The Blue Pyrenees Estate, the proud red progeny of Remy Martin Australia, is sure to last the distance. The wine, its name and presentation assert a difference and individual quality rarely matched in degree of innovation and self-confidence in Australian wine. Remy’s intention is clear – to build a marque. Its attention to detail and commitment suggest it might achieve its ambition with The Blue Pyrenees sooner than it imagined possible. Now sold in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong, France and aboard Cathay Pacific, The Blue Pyrenees is for many people the definitive style of Australian red wine.

The Blue Pyrenees Estate was named after a vineyard when everyone else was naming wine after its component varieties. The Blue Pyrenees Estate is itself a particular vineyard-within-a-vineyard at Chateau Remy’s property, where experimental plantings of cabernet sauvignon, shiraz and merlot revealed special potential and distinctive regional character.

The wine was given an assertive blue label when to smother a red wine in that fashion was tantamount to adultery. The wine won a packaging award in San Francisco prior to its release and another in Melbourne. It was blended to emphasise the uniquely eucalypt-mint characters of the Pyrenees region when other winemakers were doing their level best to avoid it.

French eccentricity has led to the wine being packaged in wooden boxes, all of which are assembled on the estate in the manner of a great French cru. The boxes are themselves printed in the characteristic blue of the brand, which Remy Martin believe to be a world ‘first’.

It is always difficult to follow a successful first vintage of a new brand, especially when the wine itself is of remarkable quality. But the last thing needed was a disastrous vintage to follow the excellent 1982 Blue Pyrenees. A drought year which made a hard, tannic wine without depth of fruit, 1983 produced a Blue Pyrenees Estate that was never released, putting back the next wine available to the marketplace by another frustrating twelve months. After the momentum generated by the brand’s entry to the market, this was nothing short of heartbreaking for Remy Martin Australia. Its implication to this consumer however, is clear. Only wines of at least a prescribed minimum quality – and a healthy minimum at that – will ever be released as Blue Pyrenees Estate.

Unfortunately the Pyrenees wine region of Victoria is just too far from Melbourne to be regarded as a one-day trip by all but the keenest. An hour’s drive the other side of Ballarat along the Sunraysia Highway, in a Mildura-like direction, it is an unknown pleasure to most people. From Ballarat the winding road takes a course through old mining and rural hamlets, whose wide streets and large brick buildings are reminiscent of the wealth and excitement of a bygone era. Their mystery, however, remains. The landscape is never flat, but reaches its topographic zenith at the picturesque range of hills known somewhat optimistically as the Pyrenees, clearly named as such by an explorer whose long voyage across the flat seas of the Pacific had distorted all memory of what constituted a mountain. Nevertheless, the Pyrenees they remain.

The Pyrenees are handsomely forested with a variety of tall, proud eucalypts and stringybarks and share that uniquely Australian phenomenon of ‘blueness’ when observed from a distance on a clear, sunny day. What appears at first to be a silence and stillness is soon shattered by the local avarian population, a delight to all apart from winemakers near vintage, when precious crops run the risk of decimation by hordes of indiscriminate, puncturing beaks. Nowhere is the landscape more breathtaking than around the shores of the man-made lake at Chateau Remy, inadvertently formed during the gold-rush when a supposedly ‘floating’ dredge bit into a subterranean stream and flooded the valley, taking the dredge with it. The lake does have a practical use as well, being the major source of supplementary water for the vineyards.

Last century the area around Avoca, Moonambel and Redbank was dotted with goldmines, miners and their camps, the largest of which became the hamlets and towns that remain today. The region’s viticultural history began in 1848, when a Mr MacKereth planted a commercial vineyard. As the size of his family increased, so did MacKereth’s vineyard, to the point when his cellars eventually had the space to store 100,00 litres of wine. Much of this wine was exported, although local trade was strong enough for there to be three wine shops in Avoca. Quality remains unquestioned, for MacKereth’s son Alfred claimed in a letter to “have won sufficient certificates to paper a good-sized room”.

Over the turn of the century the local market for wine began to diminish in favour of the raw local spirits and the sweeter, more potent fortified wines shipped across from the Rutherglen district in the State’s north-east.
After negociations with Seppelt fell through Edwin MacKereth, then responsible for the winery, sold it to a Methodist minister named Dawson, bringing the region’s development as a wine-producer to an abrupt halt. Dawson promptly uprooted the last twenty hectares of vines, shut down the winery and destroyed the cellars.

A Mr Adams re-established winegrowing with a property that was still flourishing in 1941 when visited by Francois de Castella, as Kofoeds’s Mountain Creek, under its new owner J. Kofoed. It which went out of production in 1945.

The Pyrenees’ recent revival of the region began in 1963 when John Robb began the planting of the Chateau Remy property under the direction of Remy Martin Australia and Melbourne wine merchants Nathan and Wyeth. White varieties selected for premium brandy production were first to be planted although all plantings and redevelopment in the last decade have focussed on premium table and sparkling wine varieties.

Chateau Remy has been joined in recent years by other specialist wine producers. The period from 1970 to 1974 saw the development of Mount Avoca, Summerfield, Taltarni, Redbank and Warrenmang.

The Pyrenees have become known as one of the best and most consistent of the quality Australian table-wine producing regions. It is certainly one of the cooler climates of Victoria, although frost is fortunately rare. Its altitude of 600 metres and location in the passage of southerly ocean winds provide a moderating influence over the ripening season. The vineyards of the Pyrenees have been planted in a narrow rainfall belt, about 18 kilometres wide. Annual rainfall varies from 600mm at Chateau Remy to 525 mm at Redbank. The rainfall’s incidence is ideal for viticulture, seeing that it mainly falls in winter and spring, with the occasional shower in the remainder of the growing season at a rate of between 25 and 40 mm per month.

Vintage usually begins in late March or early April and it is not uncommon for the later varieties to be picked well into May.

The region’s topsoil is gravelly and sandy and strongly interspersed with quartz and shale, like much of Victoria’s formerly prosperous gold country. The clay subsoil varies in colour across the region, from red at Redbank, to yellow at Avoca and orange at Moonambel.

Like many of the world’s great wines, the Blue Pyrenees Estate is a blended wine. Different grape varieties are chosen to contribute particular flavours and characteristics, their synergy and harmony able to achieve a result far superior to their constituent components. Winemaker Vincent Gere describes his philosophy towards the varieties used for the Blue Pyrenees Estate. “We will only ever take the best fruit available from any given year. Cabernet provides the elegance of the wine, shiraz its body and richness. Straight cabernet sauvignon is not at its best by itself in its first four years – the wine is too hollow. We use merlot in the blend only when it is clearly better than the shiraz from that vintage.”

The Blue Pyrenees Estate is a wine to cellar to be seen at its peak. Time is needed for the firm structure and tannic backbone of the cabernet sauvignon to soften and to marry with the wine’s complex fruit, enhanced by the spicy, black-pepper of the shiraz and the berry sweetness of the merlot. To understand the wine better it helps to know how it is made.

Vincent Gere achieves the final bottled result only after the creation of many separate batches of what began as the same wine, using different picking times, fermentation techniques, and different new French oaks for varying periods of maturation. After an average of five months’ maturation these batches are then carefully remodelled into the finished wine after an exhaustive blending process.

The finished wine receives an average of sixteen months in oak, half of which is brand-new each year. The precise length of the maturation depends on the nature of the wine made each year.

Winemaker for The Blue Pyrenees Estate, Vincent Gere has had an extraordinary introduction to winemaking, in three continents. His intensive experience already includes management of a vintage at Chateau d’Yquem, the home of the world’s greatest sweet wine, when in 1986 he worked day and night to process one of the largest crops ever seen there.

Gere has already qualified as a Master of Agronomy with a PhD in Viticulture and Oenology at ENSA Montpellier, where he specialised in the selection of soils and climates, and in studies to settle the new Appellation in the Languedoc area. At Montpellier he also researched the technique of cryo extraction, which aims to extract a more flavoursome and sweet extract, with less skin, at pressing.

Gere’s winemaking experience began at Cognac, making cognac and Pineau des Charentes (the local aperitif), with a little local, but de-classified red wine as well. But seeing that his father’s winemaking experience was largely in Bordeaux, where he managed the cellars of Pontet Canet (5th Growth) and Malescasse (4th Growth) in the Medoc, Vincent went there for further experience.

Since then he has spent time in various parts of the world working with wine. He had three months in Canada, where he developed the first vineyard and winery in Quebec, and studied a particularly potent example of a cool climate. He then completed a vintage at the large Cooperative Marseillan (near Marseilles) in the South of France, before his experience at Yquem, where he also overlooked Chateau de Fargues. After then travelling Spain and Italy he arrived in Australia to take up his position with Remy Martin in April 1987.

1982 wine excellent, stylish yet very generous in flavour – a fine bluepritn.
precise blend will vary from year to year – yields of varieties, flavours and qualities – winemaker blends for harmony and individuality

Good to see no varietis – not falling back to generic labelling, but indiviudual estate labelling. One of the first.

1983 no wine released -drought, bushfires

1984 good wine, perhaps lacking the strucuture and finesse of 1982 – faster-maturung

1985 – excellent wine – warmer season -

food combinations, spiciness, pronounced depth of flavour Please login to post comment