Autumn 08

WONDERFUL PINOT NOIR FROM THE WEST? YOU WOULDN’T READ ABOUT IT!

Words Peter Hathaway

Pemberton Pinot

I love wine. Over the years, I’ve spent too many hours and overblown conversations honing an appreciation for it. From my University daze majoring in rough reds and pizza, I matured and developed into a S.N.A.Q. – a Sensitve New Age Quaffer, equally adept at quaffing burly reds and delicate whites.

But lately I have been having doubts. I find myself questioning my once catholic tastes. Feeling lost in that broad church, I sense I’m withdrawing into a narrow, puritanical devotion – a follower of one grape. The grape of grapes. The one true grape – Pinot Noir.

It would seem I’m not alone.

In the 2004 hit Sideways, the character Miles waxes, “Pinot needs constant care and attention...it can only grow in these really specific, little, tucked away corners of the world... and only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Then...oh its flavours, they’re just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and...ancient on the planet.”

Back in the real world, Australian wine guru, James Halliday once penned, “Pinot Noir is the most translucent, the most transparent, the most hauntingly ethereal and fragile of all wines”.

Halliday’s prose turns positively purple when extolling the all important bouquet of a fine Burgundy – the world’s most celebrated expression of Pinot Noir, “It is extremely easy to lose yourself in the bouquet of a great Burgundy, the minutes passing by all but unnoticed. Not infrequestly, I have hesitated to take the first sip, lest the magic of the bouquet be lost or tarnished”.

To be fair to Mr Halliday, I’d bet my heavily morgaged house that if you polled all of the world’s most tragic wine tragics on which is the workd’s greatest wine region; Burgundy (the spiritual home of Pinot Noir) would romp it in, followed by daylight, with Bordeaux (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, et al) making up the trifecta.

So there’s obviously something about this delicate grape, the red variety that best reflects the lie of the land in which it grows; the red wine that some will only consider if grown and made in Burgandy, Oregon or Otago.

And maybe that’s it? Maybe it’s Pinot’s truthful and exacting expression of terrior that stirs in the serious wine lover such passion, such pomposity, such parochialism of the palate. Maybe that’s why, when it comes to Australia’s Pinot stakes, the old money’s squarely on Yarra, Mornington, Southern Gippsland, Geelong, Tasmania and Adelaide Hills. Anywhere else and, according to the establishment, you’re backing a roughie, a real outsider.

Alright I admit, the odd wine scribe has occasionally conceded that Western Australia’s Pemberton region may have a bit of Pinot potential. But these concessions are usually sniffed with a validating disclaimer along the lines of; Pemberton Pinot os too inconsistent to warrant inclusion in the Premier Pinot Club.

I don’t subscribe to that theory.

As Jancis Robinson notes in the Oxford Companion to Wine, “Pinot Noir demands much of both vine-grower and wine-maker. It is a tribute to the unparalleled level of physical excitement generated by tasting one of Burgundy’s better reds (and it is generally agreed that the Burgundians’ success rate has been dispiritingly low) that such a high proportion of the world’s most ambitious wine producers want to try their hand with this capricious vine.”

So if the bastions of Burgundy can’t always achieve consistency with this fickle variety, is it fair to single out Pemberton for inconsistency? Is not a certain risk of vintage variation the nature of this terroir-talking beast? Come to think of it, I’ve tasted the odd Victorian and Tasmanian Pinot that didn’t live up to the promise their price tags implied. ‘...when she was good, she was very good indeed, but when she was bad she was horrid.’

No, a more accurate reason why Pemberton may not yet accurate reason why Pemberton may not yet be the wine scribe’s darling Pinot region is size. The volume of wine, let alone Pinot Noir, emerging from Pemberton is small compared to the eastern states. Understandably, familiarity and acceptance of Pemberton’s regional style is obviously lagging. Also, there’s the fact that Pemberton, being a relative newcomer, is yet to fully benefit from more mature vines. However, neither of these reasons give cause to dismiss Pemberton’s Pinot pedigree. On the contrary, the potted acknowledgement Pemberton Pinot has achieved thus far should excite rather than disappoint – tantalise with the prospect of even better things to come.

Named after and surrounding the town of Pemberton, the region is located in the southwest of Western Australia in the heart og the state’s tallest, most majestic karri torest. In fact, around 85 percent of this wine region still remains under native vegetation. Pemberton’s first vineyards were planted in the late 70s, with commercial plantings expanding throughout the 80s and 90s. The climate is cooler and wetter than the Margaret River growing season. Interestingly, the four Pinot Noir producers I spoke to for this story all have, or have had, connections to the Margaret River region, (specially, Moss Wood, Leeuwin Estate, Cape Mentelle and Barwick Estates) but were drawn to Pemberton by the region’s potential for the Burgundian varieties of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

One such producer is Picardy, owned and operated by Bill and Sandra Pannell. Margaret River pioneers, in 1969 the Pannells established one of Australia’s premier wineries, Moss Wood. Today, Bill Pannell is one of the longest surviving Pinot growers in Australia now that Murray Tyrrell and John Middleton (Mount Mary) have each shuffled off this mortal coil. Pannell first made wine from the variety at Moss Wood in 1974.

In a desire to create wine closer in style to those of Burgundy, the Pannells decided that the cooler Pemberton region would be better suited and headed south east to investigate the region. Eventually they settled on some grazing land atop a ridge after being advised by locals that the whole farm was too rocky to grow anything on. As a winemaker, this peaked Bill’s interest. It turned out to be rich limestone gravel over a light clay, which retainsmoisture (a viticultureist’s dream as it’s conductive to really gooood root development) and meant Pannell didn’t need to irrigate. Picardy’s first wine was the 1996 Pinot Noir. To this day, Pinot Noir is still Picardy’s largest planting, producing the excellent Reserve Pinot Noir, which is an absolute steal at $20-$25 and the very classy Tete de Cuvee (a French term roughly translating to ‘top drop of the winery’), which goes for $40-$45.

When describing Picardy’s Pinot Pannell says, “We get a refined, elegant texture here, layered with complexity – it’s a striking mix. It’s the contrast that’s the magic. You’re never going to produce a Burgundy,  you’ll produce a Pemberton Pinot. Just the same as the Yarra will never produce a Burgundy, it’ll be a Yarra Pinot. What you get are regional characteristics. I think to slavishly try and reproduce Burgundy is a mistake, you’ve got to allow the terroir to express itself. What er try to avoid are the big beetrooty palates. We like a bit more elegance, a bit more finesse.

“I think Pemberton is a very good area for Pinot. People expect you to do miricles with young vines but I think you need at least 10 years on your vines before they start to show you what they can do. In Burgundy, they take 40 years before they start showing their best.”

Picardy’s 2005 Tete de Cuvee, which Pannell rates as the best Pinot released by Picardy so far, would seem to back up the ‘coming of vine age’ theory.

While terroir defines a Picardy Pinot from a good Burgundy, Pannell believes there is a similarity shared between the two styles; they both enjoy good aging potential and as such require some time in the bottle.

In regards to Picardy’s wines, “They do go into tight spots. They retain their fruit for a couple of months post bottling and then the tannins start to domonate, the fruits tend to slump and become less overt, But with time that comes back and you get a much more complex wine as a result. We’re not sure why, but we do get really low pH levels in this area which is very helpful for aging, What you need to age a wine is alcohol, tannin and low pH.

We get quite reasonable alcohol, and we work a fair bit of tannin into it. To see what Pinot really can do, the true complexity, you do need to see a wine that has been aged”.

Another leaf that the Pannells have taken out of the Burgundy book, (a region they still visit biennially) is seeking greater complexity and more harmonious integration of characters by planting seven different Pinot Noir clones in his vineyard; two that already existed in Australia, the other five Dijon clones he sourced from Burgundy. Pannell currently co-ferments five of these seven clones collectively, rather than the usual new world practice of fermenting them separately and blending them later, This is closer to the oldworld model, where they often have differnet clones mixed up in the same blicks. Pannell can identify the characters inbued by each clone; one gives elegance; anoter, earthy farmyard characters; another, mid-palate richness.

My advise – don’t wait for Pemberton Pinot to become the in –vogue darling of those who deem these things. Seek it out now. It’s not as if Pemberton produceres are sitting on piles of flavoursome, complex Pinot, crying about the lack of love from the wine scribes, They’re too busy sending it to restaurants and collectors at home and abroad who just happened to discover the delights of Pemberton’s terroir before you did.