After an impoverished childhood marked by tragedy, Mike Hayes has emerged to create the Vineyard of the Future to help save the Australian wine industry from global warming

Queenslander Mike Hayes is emerging as the saviour of the Australian wine industry. His Vineyard of the Future for USQ is of national significance said Vice-Chancellor Geraldine Mackenzie.

Champion Granite Belt winemaker Mike Hayes is a true son of the Queensland soil. He eats dirt to prove it.

We are at Sirromet’s St Jude’s vineyard just off the New England highway at Ballandean when he scoops a handful of crumbling clay soil and begins chomping away like a farmer might chew a carrot.

He invites us to munch a mouthful with him so my travelling companion Bob Gordon and I oblige. The other member of my tasting trio, Bernard Power, shakes his head.

Power looks askance as Mike and Bobby and I discuss the earthy, mushroom notes and mineral content that will miraculously transport itself into the grapes and then into the bottle.

“I’m tasting the vitality of the soil,” says Hayes, 55. “Good wines are made from soil that has the right organic matter. In effect, I’m tasting the life of the wine by tasting the life of the soil.”

Who is to argue with a man who has won gold medals for 23 different wine varieties?

St Jude’s is at the epicentre of the burgeoning Queensland wine industry and it is where Hayes says he has wanted to be for years. He is now director of viticulture and winemaking at Sirromet Wines after shocking the wine world nearly a year ago, by defecting from Symphony Hill Wines, just up the hill on Eukey Road.

The name Sirromet, was the creation of Gold Coast entrepreneur Terry Morris. The name comes from letters of his name spelt backwards.

Despite his success with Symphony Hill, Hayes is hungry for more. “I wont lie to you. I’ve wanted to join the Sirromet team for many years now,” he says. “I can see Terry’s exceptional vision. I can see where he wants to take the industry and I want to be part of that. We have the same aim: We want to make the best possible wine on the planet.

“Terry Morris has been one of the greatest things to happen to the Queensland wine industry. His belief in the industry has been extraordinary.”

Hayes was Australian winemaker of the year in 2017 following an astonishing decade at Symphony Hill where he scooped gold medals and trophies at every big city wine show.

Hayes admits he was a bit of a “mug-lair” as a young man until he met his partner Andrea Newley, 50, his “soulmate”, who helped him turn his life around.

She says he has an almost unquenchable thirst for knowledge. He reads and reads and reads, she says. “The house is full of books.”

Hayes left school at 15 but later returned to complete a Master of Professional Studies (Alternative Grape Varieties) at the University of Southern Queensland where he is now an adjunct professor in charge of a special project.

“The university has really shaped me,” he says. “In the early days I didn’t understand academia. But to have the chance to go back to university and pass a degree meant a lot to me personally.’’

His parents Martin and Dawn Hayes were Irish Catholics who understood the glory of hard work. His father had not wanted him to leave school, so set him arduous tasks when he did.

Hayes would chip weeds for 12 to 15 hours a day and help crush grapes at night for one of the wineries in the region.

“My father wouldn’t even let me take my dog to work. He said I would be distracted, and he was right.”

 Later, Hayes helped establish the Queensland College of Wine Tourism in Stanthorpe as a joint venture betweenUSQ and the Queensland Government. Students not old enough to legally drink wine arrive for winemaking lessons from across the road at Stanthorpe State High School.

Now Hayes has begun work planting the ‘Vineyard of the Future’ to help identify and study the red and white varieties that will best withstand climate change. He says the work being done now in the Queensland high country could help “save” the industry. Seventy different varieties, many from Portugal and Spain, have already been planted.

Hayes won praise from USQ Vice-Chancellor Geraldine Mackenzie. “The Vineyard for the Future project is a nationally significant project,” she says.

It will help “future proof” the wine industry while providing students a chance to study the growing habits of different varieties, their suitability to regional conditions and their disease resistance.

“As a regional university with strong links to communities, we know how important it is to provide hands-on experience for students in emerging industries like wine and hospitality,’’ Mackenzie says. The college offers students pathways to employment, “while helping retain young people in our regions”.

Hayes believes climate change will hurt the Australian wine industry with the Hunter Valley in NSW and the Barossa Valley in South Australia facing a grim future.

“Our industry faces enormous challengers,” he says. “We may be seeing the end of the good days for pinot noir, chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon and shiraz. As temperatures rise we will have to start looking at some of the alternative varieties and other emerging varieties.

“All the valleys are of big concern. The Barossa and the Hunter and others are going to have to start thinking about changing their varieties. Some already are.

“If they don’t change over the next 30 to 50 years there, vines simply won’t perform. I personally think it will happen a lot quicker than that; perhaps 10 or 15 years. We are looking at temperature increases of between four and six degrees. If we don’t start droughtproofing our vineyards we will have no future.”

As temperatures rise, grapes will ripen too quickly and there will be a profound loss of flavour.

The man who left school at 15, lectured visiting scientists at the World Science Festival in Brisbane recently about hardy, autochthonous or indigenous grape varieties that showed resilience to changing climate.

On a Churchill Scholarship in 2013, Hayes visited 50 wine region and tasted 650 grape varieties throughout Europe. He had a damascene conversion at Alantenjo in Portugal when he was shown a set autochthonous vines he was told survived the last ice age.

“The Spanish and Portuguese varieties have evolved over many hundreds of year to handle climate diversity,” he says. “I knew then that was what I wanted to study when I got home.”

Hayes believes Australian quaffers may be sipping Tinta barriada or Tinta cao in place of shiraz in the future. Other reds in his Stanthorpe project patch include “strange bird” alternative varieties already being cultivated on the Granite Belt. Wines like sagrantino, tempranillo, grenache and Touriga nacional are harvested in small quantities.

Petit manseng, a quality thick-skinned French white grape is also planted. It has been flagged in California as a variety that may better resist climate change. Other whites include pignoletto, fiano, albarino, and vermentino.

Hayes urges young people who like working outdoors to consider wine science courses offered by USQ. “There are 160 countries that make wine,” he says. “Learn how to make wine and the world is your oyster. But it won’t happen overnight. You have to dedicate yourself to the job. And you have to be pretty tough to handle all the rigours.” 

Hayes has had his bad times. He was one of nine children.

“Growing up was pretty bloody tough,” he says. “Sometimes you had to fight for your vittles. We slept two to a bed with two beds in one bedroom. It was a pretty congested household.”

His old school principal and mentor John Neville tells me Hayes had to rush home from school to finish his homework before the sun went down.

“In the early days we didn’t have electricity at all,” Hayes says. “We had a wood stove and a kero fridge. It was hard, but we never felt deprived. We all worked on weekends so we all had pocket money.

“We were river rats. We swam in the creeks and hunted rabbits and fish and we thought life was pretty good. We called the rabbits our underground mutton.

“We would catch four of five fish in half an hour — enough to feed our family. We brought home Murray cod, catfish and yellow belly.”

The family kept chooks and would have to kill three or four on Sundays just to feed everyone.

Hayes didn’t help the struggling family when he accidentally burnt their house down while playing with matches when he was four. The family lost everything. “They didn’t even tell me until I had grown up,” he says.

But there were much harder times. His big sister Michelle was 16 when she died as the result of immune disease and another sister, Sharon, took her own life when she was 32.

And two brothers, Wayne, 68, and Morris, 59, succumbed to heart disease.

“Two sisters and two brothers have gone. But you have to keep fighting. You have to put your chin up and keep going.”

He says he was inspired by the life of Angelo Puglisi, a dirt-poor Italian migrant who never have up.

“The Puglisi family, I believe, embody the Queensland fighting spirit like few others,’’ he says. “They have done it really tough from the start. But they survived and prospered.

“Once they were hit with four or five frosts in a row that just about wiped out their entire crop. Then came the hail ….

“But Angelo kept his chin up. He just keep working and working as hard as ever. He drove the same car for 600,000km and he wouldn’t put any of the workers off even though there was little work.

“Angelo has been a real battler for his family. For that he has been rewarded with a rich life. He inspires me. I have got nothing by the highest respect for that family and what they have achieved.”

Now Hayes is continuing to reinvigorate the Sirromet’s vineyards. The dirt taste tests continue.

New irrigation and canopy management and the addition of select organic fertilisers is paying dividends.

Despite drought, Sirromet grape production was up 20 per cent at this year’s harvest.