The Wine Farm: down-to-earth unconventional

When Neil Hawkins and his wife Anna were looking for a name for their venture, The Wine Farm was an obvious choice.

The Wine Farm in Koonwarra, Gippsland, in southern Victoria.

South Africans sometimes call their vineyards wine farms, a lovely term that emphasises the human activity of growing grapes and the gastronomic, cultural aspect of production. So when South African winemaker Neil Hawkins and his Australian wife Anna bought a small vineyard and winery in Koonwarra, Gippsland, in southern Victoria a few years ago and were looking for a name for their venture, The Wine Farm was the obvious choice.

I first came across one of the couple’s wines in a restaurant a few months ago: a deliciously tangy white “field blend” of mostly pinot gris co-fermented with some chardonnay. And it’s telling, I think, that when I asked Neil Hawkins to give me some information about what they were doing he sent a long detailed email, with more than 700 words describing the vineyard’s soil and how they farmed (grey loam over red clay; lots of hard work by hand, whipper-snippering the weeds, hedging the tips of the growing vines, and so on) and just 30 words on winemaking — “to be honest I find it a bit boring talking about what I do in the cellar”. The result of all this — extra effort in the vineyard, minimal manipulation in the winery — is a bunch of fine, focused and savoury wines that speak of the cool climate they’re grown in.

The 2015 Sauvignon Blanc ($37) is lovely and floral, with a chalky, slippery, rice-water texture. The 2015 Riesling ($45) is all stony minerals, like licking pebbles after rain, and sherbety acidity. And the 2015 Farm Wine ($29), an unusual blend of all the grapes grown on the property — red and white: cabernet sauvignon, shiraz, pinot noir, riesling, gewurz, pinot gris, sauvignon blanc and chardonnay — is a light, ethereal slip of a thing, pale and juicy and snappy and pretty, with a touch of undergrowth to ground it.

These are not exactly conventional wines — there’s a little cloudiness here, a little funkiness there, they’re bottled under cork and dipped in wax — but they’re nowhere near as wild and woolly as some of the other wax-topped low-fi, small-batch bottles out there. They can be ordered direct from thewinefarm.com.au.

Ryan Walsh and Freya Hohnen are another couple making exciting new wines, on the other side of the country in Margaret River, Western Australia. The wines are sold under the Walsh & Sons name and are bottled with bold, bright, wistful storybook labels: a tiger lolls in a tree watching a nest of chicks; a songbird settles on a blossom-covered bough; a little boy stares through a telescope at the stars and crescent moon.

Walsh and Hohnen have backgrounds in farming and vineyards: Hohnen is the winemaker daughter of David Hohnen, one of the founders of Cape Mentelle and Cloudy Bay; Walsh’s family has farmed wheat and dairy for generations, here and in New Zealand, and before leaving to set up Walsh & Sons with Freya he worked with her as a winemaker at his father-in-law’s McHenry Hohnen winery.

I am particularly impressed with three wines in the current Walsh & Sons range: the 2015 Little Poppet ($24) is a rich, golden-tasting, deeply satisfying retro white mash-up of semillon and chardonnay (if you were wondering whatever happened to this once-ubiquitous Aussie blend, wonder no more); the 2014 Felix ($30) is a supple and seductive expression of Margaret River shiraz, with a fabulous, wild gamey note running through its generous dark berry fruit; and the 2014 Roi ($45) is an intensely flavoured, firmly structured, delicious cabernet that gets better and better as it spends time being swirled around in a big decanter. More: walshandsons.com.au.