Winemaker of the Year Profile – Tim Knappstein

What’s a winemaker’s interpretation of a mid-life crisis? Just ask Tim Knappstein. Fifteen years after he commenced his winemaking career in 1966 with what was then the Stanley Wine Company, he and wife Annie Knappstein had already begun to establish their 26.3 ha cool-climate Lenswood Vineyards high in the Adelaide Hills. For a winemaker who cut his teeth on the traditional wines so singly identified with the Clare Valley, Knappstein successfully then reinvented himself as a key provider to the smart bistro and restaurant set of some of Australia’s most stylish and contemporary table wines.

For today Tim Knappstein is a born-again pinot noir fanatic. His rich, deeply concentrated and fully-ripened pinot noir has revealed more refinement with almost each of its successive releases since 1991. The pristine, sweet cherry fruit of recent vintages contrasts with the prune and tobacco notes of his earlier wines. The 1997 vintage, clearly the most supple and restrained, sends a message to every pinot maker in Victoria and across the Tasman that Lenswood has what it takes to put its pinot with the best of them.

Furthermore, having phased in Adelaide Hills fruit into his latter chardonnays from the Clare Valley, he is as much a chardonnay freak as anyone going around today, with a renewed focus on the advantages given him by his cool-climate vineyard. Knappstein’s chardonnay is typically sumptuous and savoury, with rich melon, pear and apple fruit, spicy oak married with carefully integrated lees and malolactic influences.

But there’s also a Bordelais aspect to his winemaking ambitions. He now grows more sauvignon blanc than anything else and there is no more eagerly awaited expression of this variety in Australia than the racy, often quite grassy, but deeply succulent Lenswood Vineyards edition, with its piercing blackcurrant, gooseberry and passionfruit flavours. The latest regular addition to the range is a straight semillon which, like the later-ripening Bordeaux red varieties, has taken a little longer to regularly achieve and maintain a suitable balance in the vineyard between fruit ripeness and growth of foliage.

An enthusiast of fast-moving automotive and aeronautical machinery and a highly respected wine show judge, Knappstein’s family has been associated with the Clare Valley since 1893 when Joseph Knappstein, Tim’s grandfather founded the Stanley Wine Company with three partners, whom he had bought out by 1912. The company remained in the family’s control until 1971, when Len Evans helped broker its sale to the HJ Heinz Company.

Knappstein remained as winemaker until after the 1976 vintage, fashioning a brilliant array of rieslings under the famous Bin 5 and Bin 7 labels, of which he rates the 1971, 1973 and 1975 vintages as his proudest efforts. Although red wine was then but a small proportion of Stanley Leasingham’s production, the Bin 49 Cabernet Sauvignon, Bin 56 Cabernet Malbec and the Bin 61 Shiraz were often landmark wines. Knappstein ranks the 1971, 1972, 1973 and 1975 vintages of red wines as his favourites of the period and still believes the 1971 Bin 49 augmented with 5 shiraz to be one of the best wines he’s ever made.

With his mother as a partner, Tim Knappstein established Enterprise Wines in 1976, quickly hitting his straps with a string of definitive Clare Valley rieslings and supple, reserved cabernet sauvignons in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But by the time the company was sold to Blass in 1986, which then sold to Mildara in 1991, the Knappsteins were five years into their new project at Lenswood.

While the early vintages from Lenswood Vineyards were also made at Clare, Tim Knappstein’s last vintage as winemaker at Knappstein Wines was 1995. Since then, his winemaking has been gradually transferred to Nepenthe, where the 1998 vintage was made. Please login to post comment