Heritage vineyard tells the Barossa Valley story
It’s a vineyard like no other. A heritage nursery project tells the Barossa Valley’s story in roots, shoots and leaves.
In the coldest morning of this bleakest of years, a small, well-insulated group gather atop a gently sloping Barossan hill and prepare to stud it with sticks. A freshly planted vineyard is an unprepossessing thing. Sturdy posts book-ending rows and wires strung between them with nothing to do until green tendrils curl around them and their work can begin. Those sticks give little clue as to what lies ahead and, in this case particularly, what has come before. This vineyard is like no other on the planet.
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It runs down the hill below the Barossa Cellar, a community project instigated by the Barons of the Barossa. The Barons are the Australian manifestation of the global wine trade’s fondness for ceremonial guilds, a group whose purpose is to advocate for all that is good and distinctive about the Barossa. Part of their charter is to manage a collection of the region’s best wines, nurture them to maturity and use them to celebrate the Barossan bounty around the world.
Last year a physical repository for that collection was completed after a long period of fundraising, a space for the community to gather for significant events as well as a temperature- controlled vault for the display of some 3000 bottles and cellaring capacity for 100,000 more.
As the final stage of the project, and a source of ongoing funding, a vineyard was conceived that would flourish in front of the Barossa Cellar and, in time, produce a wine each year. The decision to plant shiraz made itself – it is the Barossa’s signature variety – but the choice of genetic material to plant presented more difficult questions. And a unique opportunity.
Rather than plant the vineyard using a single source for cuttings, 35 significant vineyards from around the Barossa were identified, monitored and tested for vine health before cuttings were taken from selected vines in each and prepared in the Yalumba nursery for eventual planting at the Barossa Cellar site. In doing so, they created more than just another vineyard. They’ve built an ark.
“I don’t think this idea has ever been replicated around the world from a storytelling perspective,” says Andrew Caillard MW, a Baron of the Barossa and an expert on the provenance of Australian vineyards. “There are many instances of subregional sourcing to plant vineyards but not at a micro-scale like this, where every vine’s provenance from around the Barossa can be identified. This is effectively a heritage nursery vineyard that reflects greatly on the Barossa wine community.”
The rows are a map in microcosm, with the southernmost source vineyard – Glen and Tania Monaghan’s Stonegarden at Springton – providing the southernmost row and each subsequent row moving further north until the 38th and final row, a collection of cuttings from the Resurrection vineyard at St Kitt’s, the Barossa’s northern outpost.
This vineyard is an extension of the Barossa’s unique history and traditions, a viticultural representation of toil and labours of successive generations who have called this place home. It’s ancestory.com in shoots and sap and leaves.
Row 25: The Command Vineyard
Wellington Rice had an ulterior motive when he bought a sprawling bungalow and surrounding vineyard on the banks of the North Para River. It was the late 1970s and vineyard prices were in a slump; real estate agents were pretty clear on the angle they needed to pitch: “Buy the bungalow, get the vineyard for free.”
Although he’d always taken an interest in wine, Rice saw the property more as a lure than a lifestyle. His daughter Lorraine was moving to Saudi Arabia with her husband and sons and he thought the prospect of running a vineyard in the Barossa Valley might be enough to make them reconsider. It wasn’t. They went anyway.
But soon Lorraine’s husband, Neil Ashmead, got a job in Adelaide and Wellington once again played the vineyard card, suggesting the family live in the bungalow, Neil commute to his civil engineering job in town and the family help work the vineyard as a sideline. That sideline quickly became the main game when grape prices collapsed, and the family became winemakers as well as growers. “Dad always had a lot of sayings,” says Lorraine, “but one we heard more than most was: ‘When they run, you walk. When they walk, you run.’ Around 1980, a lot of people were walking away from vineyards, so we started running.”
They built a winery, built their Elderton brand into one of the most respected names in the Barossa and the business goes from strength to strength under the stewardship of Lorraine’s sons Alister and Cameron. The wine produced from that undervalued vineyard, now in its 126th year, is known as ‘Command’ and in markets like the US it’s been pivotal in winning converts to the classic Barossa style. Not bad for a place that wasn’t much more than the steak-knives thrown into a house sale.
Row 7: Poonawatta
“I was born with a spring in my back,” says Sue Holt. “Wherever life was going to take me, I was always going to be pulled back here.”
Holt’s roots run even deeper into the Eden Valley’s weathered dirt than those of the 140-year-old vineyard she and her husband John brought back from the brink in the early 1970s. She is the great granddaughter of James Heggie, one of the original settlers of the high country to the Barossa’s east, and when her father Colin purchased the Poonawatta property (the name means ‘healthy land’ in the language of the original Peramangk people) in 1966, she and John didn’t hesitate when asked to come back and run it.
The property had been sliced and diced from its original 100ha through sale, succession and soldier resettlement since Ferdinand Vorwerk established it in 1880, but Sue and John put much of it back together, most notably the old vineyard block in 1971. The restoration of the vineyard was long and arduous. Cows were cleared out, crumbling infrastructure rebuilt, frosts fought and ailing, ancient vines nursed back to health. It was a process that took a number of years, completed just in time to run smack bang into the greatest existential threat the place had faced in a hundred years.
“I get goosebumps when I think how close it got to being ripped out,” says Holt when reflecting on the Vine Pull Scheme of the early 1980s. A shortsighted and drastic government response to temporary oversupply, the scheme paid growers to grub out vineyards and saw a lot of old Barossa vineyards lost. But it also galvanised the local community and created a new wave of smaller producers who celebrated the precious viticultural assets of the Barossa. It brought about a deeper understanding of how the number and variety of old vineyards on their own roots gave the Barossa a story to tell unlike any other in the world of wine.
It’s fair to say that without the trauma of the Vine Pull Scheme, the motivation for a project such as the Barossa Cellar Vineyard might not exist. “It’s such a source of pride for us to be included in this,” Sue Holt says. “That others think our little vineyard is as special as we do, that all the hard work has ended up with us being part of this project is a great joy.”
Row 19: Bethany Road 1847 ‘Ancestor’ Vineyard
Christie Schulz is uniquely placed to understand how the Vine Pull Scheme turned out to be both productive and destructive. She saved an old vineyard and built the award-winning Turkey Flat label on the back of it. “I was 32 years old, two young kids, when my ex-husband and I went to the bank asking for the money to buy a vineyard that wasn’t making a cent,” she explains. “I still don’t quite know how we got it.”
The vineyard had been in the Schulz family for several generations, part of a large property that incorporated a thriving butchery business among the vines. But Christie’s father-in-law was tiring of the diminishing returns from grape growing and the vineyard’s proximity to the township of Tanunda made it a prime candidate for destruction and delivery to the rapacious property developers circling at the time.
The prized position that made it so vulnerable was also the reason it was so important it be saved. The vines were part of an experimental vineyard of more than 70 varieties planted by Johann Fiedler in 1847 in order to see which ones would prove the most suitable in this strange new land. Fiedler was the son-in-law of Pastor Kavel, leader of the congregation of Silesian Lutherans escaping persecution in their native Prussia whose influence is still so strongly felt through the Barossa today. That connection to Kavel provided Fiedler with the first parcel of land surveyed, the 100 of Moorooroo, and the vines he planted are most likely second only to the vines planted by Christian Auricht at nearby Langmeil in 1843 as the oldest viable shiraz vineyards still in production.
Vineyards like this are the foundations on which the Barossa was built and without these precious plots the valley would be a very different proposition to what it is today. “These old vineyards, the oldest still productive vines on the planet, pre-dating the destruction by phylloxera of European vineyards and subsequently still on their own roots, are utterly central to the story of the Barossa and how we take ourselves to markets around the world,” says Schulz.
That this vineyard would be represented in the Barossa Cellar Vineyard was never really in doubt, but whatever personal pride Schulz takes in that comes second to the pride she has for what this project says about the Barossa. “This project is not just about a vineyard, it’s about the unity of the Barossa community,” she says. “That’s what really makes this place special.”
Row 35: Kalleske ‘Johan George’ Vineyard
Johan George Kalleske was a passenger on the Prince George, the tri-masted barque that also brought Pastor Kavel and the first members of his congregation to South Australia in November 1838. Like most of them, he eventually settled in the Barossa, where his son Karl Heinrich Eduard Kalleske established a vineyard and farm in the valley’s northern reaches at Moppa.
The sixth and seventh generations of that family still work that land, with particular attention to a low-yielding collection of old vines across two acres that dates back to 1875. Seventh-generation family member Troy Kalleske makes the wine under the family’s eponymous label and the thing that really excites him about the Barossa Cellar Vineyard project is observing how the genetic material of their vines will adapt to the new site.
“It’s going to be fascinating to watch all these rows mature and see what they produce,” Kalleske says. “Each row represents such a distinctive vineyard, with characteristics clearly defined over a hundred years or more in some cases, so how those elements are changed by different soils and slightly different conditions will be really interesting to see.
“I reckon come harvest time in a few years, we’ll see some pretty prominent winemakers and grape growers walking up and down these rows pinching grapes to check out the results,” he adds. “I’ve got no doubt we’ll learn more about our old vineyard, and I reckon we know it pretty well, but we’ll know even more by watching how these vines go.”
The Investors
Narratives run through this vineyard in multiple ways. The sourcing of the vines connect this vineyard site to 35 others across the region, but the fundraising element of the project – in which each of the 1800 vines is “adopted” for a fee of $1000 – spreads its story all around the world.
Barossa expats far and wide have chipped in to reset the anchors that tie them to their origins and a number of local parents have donated vines in the names of their children to remind them that while they may roam, they, like Sue Holt, were born with springs attached. The row sourced from the famed Henschke vineyard, Mount Edelstone, was the first to sell out, an unsurprising reminder of the powerful reputation of one of the finest shiraz vineyards on Earth and the fastidious family who cares for it.
Many members of the local winemaking fraternity have taken the opportunity to link themselves with vineyards that helped make their careers. John Duval, for example, has made donations that recognise both his past and his future. For 29 years Duval was the senior winemaker at Penfolds, successor to industry legends such as Max Schubert and Don Ditter and a major shaper of the Barossa’s global reputation. He is one of a number of former Penfolds winemakers and viticulturists who have chosen to mark their time there with the purchase of vines in Row 30, sourced from the 3C block of the famed Kalimna vineyard at the Barossa’s northern end.
These days he makes wine with his son Tim under his own label John Duval Wines, and as part of that project he works closely with Adrian Hoffmann, a major force in Barossa viticulture who deploys 160 years of Barossa grape growing heritage in the family with the wisdom of Yoda and the appearance of Chewbacca. Hoffmann has two vineyard blocks contributing to the Barossa Cellar Vineyard project. The Elmer Roehr block from which Duval takes fruit populates Row 37 of the new vineyard, and the Dallwitz block that supplies some of the biggest names in Barossan wine produced Row 34.
Hoffmann may be the summary of this whole story made flesh. The latest chapter in a 160-year-old Barossa story, a kid who learnt how to prune vines with his grandfather, a businessman who grew the family vineyard business from 20ha to 135ha, the quiet grape grower behind some of Australia’s flashiest wines, the viticulturalist who can shape his vines to suit the needs of more than 30 highly demanding winemaking “partners” yet never suppress their innate sense of place. A Baron of the Barossa with dirt on his boots. He is one of that small group on the hillside, rugged up against the cold, observing the first cuttings going into the ground. Alongside him stands James Wark, another Baron and one of the prime movers behind the Barossa Cellar project and its attendant vineyard. This morning is the culmination of many years’ work and his satisfaction and excitement is palpable.
Wark is one of those men who smiles from the toes up. “It’s almost impossible to neatly sum up what makes the Barossa special – it’s a combination of so many things,” he says. “But we’ve come pretty close here I think.” He waves an arm over the Barossa Cellar Vineyard below. “That’s the Barossa right there.”
The Barossa Cellar Vineyard fundraising project is ongoing and vines are still available. Vine Donors will get first access to purchase the wine made from the vineyard in subsequent years. thebarossacellar.com.au
