Winemaker of the Year 2000

To many people the Australian wine industry is a large juggernaut almost out of control. More grapes are being planted here than anyone could have envisaged and at the other end of the process more Australian wine is being shipped to world markets than ever before, at a rate of growth little short of astonishing. All of which could easily make the whole thing appear as impersonal and devoid of true human involvement as a huge nationwide sausage factory.

This is why an award like the Qantas & Wine Magazine Winemaker of the Year is so important, since it focuses attention on the people at the coalface, for whom wine production is less a juggling of numbers than a very pure interaction between art and science. Australia’s best winemakers are those who create new ideas for others to emulate; those with the imagination to perceive an opportunity to craft something entirely different and with the ability to carry it through. Others are those who shun virtually all forms of contact with conventional commercial life and steadfastly pursue their own creative goals in precisely the same manner as an artist working towards an exhibition.

What Australia’s leading winemakers have in common is an ability to focus on their goals and an ability to break down the multitude of processes needed to achieve them. Nothing in winemaking happens overnight, so they also need the patience and persistence to see their goals through to completion.

In this issue of Qantas Club we introduce the eight finalists for this year’s Qantas & Wine Magazine Winemaker of the Year Award.

Jim Brayne



Since arriving at McWilliams Yenda in 1973 to take up a summer’s vacation job in the cellars, Jim Brayne has become chief winemaker for one of Australia’s largest family-owned wine companies, McWilliams.

In 1986, less than a decade after completing a winemaking degree at Roseworthy College in 1977, he became McWilliams’ chief winemaker.
A regular judge on the wine show circuit, Brayne is especially proud that McWilliams has been the Most Successful Exhibitor at each of the last six Sydney wine shows.

Jim Brayne is inextricably linked to substantial movement in quality across McWilliams’ entire folio, from the Hanwood range to the company’s emerging collection of new premium wines like Brand’s Stentiford’s Shiraz 1996 and the McWilliams Limited Release Botrytis Semillon 1997.

Brayne attributes the consistent quality of his very successful and affordable Hanwood Chardonnay to taking a small winery approach to large-scale production.

Brayne has led the re-emergence of the Coonawarra-based Brand’s Laira label, headed by such first-rate flagship wines as the Stentiford’s Shiraz and Patron’s Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz Merlot. He has also been involved in the dramatic improvements in the traditional Mount Pleasant label.

The wines made by Jim Brayne from the central NSW Barwang vineyard have totally overshot all quality expectations and have helped to prompt large-scale developments in the region.

The McWilliams Limited Release Botrytis Semillon 1997 is a brilliant new wine that reflects Brayne’s approach towards a more restrained, classic style of dessert wine.

Ed Carr



Having created an exceptional range of sparkling wines under the Seaview, Edwards & Chaffey and Killawarra labels for Southcorp Wines, in 1994 Ed Carr jumped ship to become BRL Hardy’s chief sparkling winemaker.

At all price levels, from the basement Omni NV label to BRL Hardy’s premier Arras brand Carr has delivered quality, recognised in the marketplace and on the show circuit. The Arras Chardonnay Pinot Noir 1995 is one of the most successful Australian show wines of all time.

The value for money now inherent in BRL Hardy sparkling wines is that even under the competitively priced Sir James wines is a substantial component of premier cool-climate Tasmanian fruit.

Under Carr’s direction, the Arras and the Sir James vintage labels are given four years to mature on lees prior to disgorging.

With the Leasingham Classic Clare Sparkling Shiraz and the Sir James NV Sparkling Shiraz, Carr managed to achieve what no other winemaker had done: break Seppelt’s stranglehold on show trophies for this unique indigenous style of Australian wine.

Garry Crittenden



Since his first plantings in 1982 at Dromana Estate on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Garry Crittenden has operated a leading small vineyard and winemaking business with an eye for quality and innovation.

Crittenden’s wines have consistently been amongst his region’s best.

With the introduction of his radical ‘i’ label, Crittenden lent an unprecedented degree of winemaking focus and marketing towards Italian varieties grown in Australia. These wines remain the yardstick by which these grape varieties are judged in Australia.

Crittenden’s endeavours with Dromana Estate’s Reserve label have resulted in consistently first-rate, complex wines, reaching a high point in 1997.

In 1987 Crittenden introduced what has become his ‘Schinus’ range of lively, early-drinking table wines which offer vibrant, fresh flavours at an affordable price.

Crittenden is a winner of a $5,000 fellowship from the NSW Wine Press Club, which he used to research the most suitable combinations of Italian grape variety and Australian wine regions, culminating in Italian Winegrape Varieties in Australia, released in 1999.

Vanya Cullen



Although she had been actively involved in making her family’s wines since 1984, in 1989 Vanya Cullen was handed complete control of winemaking at Cullen, one of the Margaret River’s pre-eminent small estates. She is now chief executive as well.

Although it was her mother, Di Cullen, who first blended merlot with the Cabernet Sauvignon in 1982, Vanya Cullen’s deft feel for blending and oak has helped the Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot to become one of the icons of Australian wine.

An outstanding palate and show judge, Vanya Cullen’s talents at tasting are in heavy demand in Australia and overseas.

Fermented with wild yeasts, Cullen’s Chardonnay has become a leaner, longer-living and more minerally wine with bright lemon and pineapple fruit, a silky texture, chalky mouthfeel and flinty finish .

Recognising the Margaret River’s limitations with pinot noir, Cullen refashioned her wine into a deliciously fresh, mouthfilling and earlier-drinking style based squarely around ripe, vibrant fruit which cleverly delivers the best from her vineyard.

Gary Farr



Nobody in Australia has consistently been making world-class wines from both chardonnay and pinot noir for longer than Gary Farr, who since the late 1970s has been winemaker for the highly-rated small Bannockburn winery near Geelong in Victoria.

Bannockburn’s Pinot Noir has since the early 1980s been consistently at the sharp edge of quality, style and integrity of this variety when made in Australia.

The richness of its texture and flavours and its remarkable complexity consistently puts Bannockburn Chardonnay into the very top bracket in Australian wine, on comparable terms with Leeuwin Estate and Giaconda.

Farr holds back for several years prior to release a densely flavoured, evolved wine from his traditionally Burgundian close-planted ‘Serre’ vineyard, which is sold under that name. It’s one of the most expensive Australian pinots which, from 1994 onwards, has hit simply stellar levels of quality and longevity.

Sourced from Bannockburn’s oldest plantings, the SRH Chardonnay is the white jewel in its crown. Price-wise it did to chardonnay what Yattarna would claim to have done, but quietly, and long before.

Bannockburn’s Shiraz, vinified in a fashion very similar to that used for the Pinot Noir, is a French oak matured style leader with clear Rhone Valley pretensions.

Michael Fragos



Michael Fragos is the very young senior winemaker for the very successful medium-sized Tatachilla winery at McLaren Vale, which has just announced plans to merge with the Barossa’s St Hallett.

Fragos is due much of the credit for Tatachilla’s remarkable consistency and quality across its entire range of price-points, from its Keystone Grenache Shiraz to its premier Foundation Shiraz and Clarendon Vineyard Merlot.

A local McLaren Vale inhabitant, Fragos has overseen the increase in Tatachilla’s fruit intake from from 740 tonnes in 1992 to about 6,400 tonnes in 1999, accompanied by a substantial upgrading of its plant and equipment .

By twice making the wine considered to be Champion Wine of the Show at the annual McLaren Vale Wine Show, Fragos was crowned McLaren Vale’s ‘Bushing King’ in both 1997 and 1999.

Over recent vintages Fragos has maintained a strong and assertive ‘house’ Tatachilla style and stamp over its wines, while still enabling them to express the characteristics expected of regions like McLaren Vale, the Adelaide Hills, Langhorne Creek and Padthaway.

Andrew Hood



At his small winery near Cambridge between Hobart and Sorell, Andrew Hood is a consultant winemaker who makes about eighty wines each year for around thirty different vineyards.

Formerly a micobiologist and winemaking educator, Hood has been a consultant winemaker since 1990, building his own winemaking facility in time for the 1994 vintage. His efforts have given much-needed winemaking professionalism and resources to a large number of top-quality small vineyards which would otherwise have had great difficulty achieving their present standards and reputations.

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.

Hood’s clients include Meadowbank, Spring Vale, Elsewhere, Winstead and Providence.

Hood’s best wines have come from the varieties of riesling, chardonnay and pinot noir, each of which he has developed into finely structured and intensely flavoured expressions of cool climate wines.

Hood’s own Wellington brand is one of the most reliable and polished Tasmanian labels and includes the innovative ‘Iced Riesling’, made from riesling grapes harvested at normal time and freeze-concentrated in the winery to deliver a pristine fruit-driven dessert style.

Phil Laffer



Since 1990 Phil Laffer has been chief winemaker and director of viticulture for one of Australia’s largest wine companies, the Pernod Ricard-owned Orlando Wyndham.

As custodian of Australia’s largest exported wine brand in Jacob’s Creek, it’s not that surprising that despite the steadily increasing number of Orlando Wyndham’s top-drawer labels, it’s Jacob’s Creek that gives Phil Laffer the most satisfaction.

Their remarkable consistency and quality at around eight Australian dollars a bottle makes the Jacob’s Creek range something pretty special, especially when you consider it represents substantially more than ten percent of Australia’s entire wine production. Little wonder Laffer’s proud of it.

Under Laffer’s stewardship at Orlando Wyndham, the company has refocused on its premier wines to the extent that its flagship collection of Jacaranda Ridge Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon, Lawson’s Padthaway Shiraz and Steingarten Riesling have substantially improved and been joined by other labels such as the Centenary Hill Shiraz, the revitalised Wyndham Estate Reserve range and the excellent Montrose Barbera and Sangiovese.

Sure they’re a little controversial in what they’re identified with through their name, but the Jacob’s Creek Reserve wines made under Laffer’s guidance have been some of the most decorated entrants on the show circuit for several years.

Phil Laffer is unquestionably due some of the credit for the fact that Jacob’s Creek remains the only non-human winner of the other prestigious individual trophy in Australian wine, the Maurice O’Shea Award.

Mike Peterkin



Michael Peterkin is an intense, but engaging medical practitioner, viticulturist and wine maker who not only owns the famous Pierro winery in Margaret River, but has recently added to that the nearby Fire Gully vineyard.

It was very uncommon in Australia in 1980, when Peterkin first began to develop the Pierro vineyard, to plant vines close together on poor granite soils with a view to controlling vigour and initating competition to survive.

Peterkin’s Pierro Chardonnay has, since the late 1980s, unquestionably been not only one of the finest in Australia, but has led the way for many other winemakers aiming to create a richly textured and complex style.

The Pierro Semillon Sauvignon Blanc LTC (which also includes a splash of chardonnay) is one of the best examples of the Margaret River’s other great white wine, blended from white Bordeaux grapes.

Harder to find than hens’ teeth, the Pierro Unfiltered Chardonnay is a rare reserve bottling which takes Peterkin’s approach towards naturally crafted, minimally handled and complex chardonnay to an extreme rarely witnessed in Australia.

Louisa Rose



Yet to enter her fourth decade, Louisa Rose is an outstanding winemaking talent now responsible for Yalumba’s entire white wine production, a role which encompasses the white wines included under the labels of Heggies, Hill-Smith Estate, ‘D’, Pewsey Vale, Yalumba and Oxford Landing.

Rose collected a scholarship degree in physics in 1991 and was a multiple prize winner and dux of her Roseworthy College winemaking course in 1993.

By 1994 Rose was given the reins to all Yalumba’s sparkling wines, before being handed the company’s entire white production just two years later.

A sought-after show judge, Rose took the chairmanship of the Barossa Wine Show between 1997 and 1999.

No winemaker in Australia has had the local experience with the northern Rhone white grape of viognier to touch that of Louisa Rose, who since 1992 has made it under an ever-expanding number of labels and a wide variety of styles, primary and complex, sweet and dry.

Rose has overseen the making of several outstanding vintages of riesling from the company’s Heggies and Pewsey Vale vineyards, including the superlative 1998 release from Heggies. Please login to post comment