The magic of Dean Hewitson’s vineyard lies in its many secrets
While every vine in the Old Garden is different, one is more different than the rest. It’s a single shiraz vine hidden in the middle of the vineyard.
In the mid 1990s Dean Hewitson pressed pause on a career making other people’s wine and took some time to think.
He took a job running a mobile bottling unit and in the cabin of that truck, alone with his thoughts and a box of badly warped cassettes, he started to envision what a label with his own name on it would look like.
That it would be built on old Barossa vineyards was already known. Where they might be, and how to access their fruit, was not.
Then, one day, as that bottling truck came over the rise from Jacobs Creek and rolled down into Rowland Flat, he saw it. A single hectare, planted by Freidrich Koch in 1853, that changed everything. Freidrich’s descendants still care for the vineyard today. They call it the Old Garden and it’s believed to be home to the oldest mourvèdre vines on Earth.
Here, in 2m of sand sitting over limestone, vines planted eight years before the outbreak of the American Civil War, each twisted into its own unique form, continue to produce the kind of fruit that haunts winemaker dreams. It’s a site so special Hewitson can now, after nearly three decades working with the Koch family, produce three wines from this one ancient hectare. While every vine in the Old Garden is different, one is more different than the rest.
It’s a single shiraz vine hidden in the middle of the vineyard. Nobody knows how it found its way there, most likely a stray cutting among a bundle of mourvèdre sticks. Hewitson saw an opportunity. Over many years, budwood was taken from this single vine, and grafted to rootstock in an old vineyard he was restoring on the banks of the Para River at Dorrien.
This restored vineyard produces Hewitson’s Monopole shiraz and is a precious repository of vines carrying the DNA of that one rogue vine at Rowland Flat. In great years, before the wines from the two vineyards are bottled, the very best barrels of each are blended to produce a wine that becomes this vineyard story’s powerfully profound third act.
HEWITSON OLD GARDEN MOURVÈDRE 2021 ($90)
Blueberries ripe to bursting, dried orange rind, coriander seed, candle wax. The fat and fur, salt and smoke from a poacher’s fire. A dark earthy seam.
Sinewy flesh melts across the mid-palate and a fine grained grit pulls the wine through a sustained finish suggesting cellaring will be rewarded. One of the most significant mourvèdre wines on the planet.
98 points
HEWITSON MONOPOLE SHIRAZ 2021 ($90)
Dark plum, liqueur cherry chocolate. Some sweet pipe tobacco and rubbed rosemary. Beautifully silky, a gliding grace across the palate, ultra high-def tannins the texture of crushed rock. Barossa shiraz for the Rhone freaks out there, but a wine that never loses its Australian accent.
94 points
HEWITSON BARREL 1853 SHIRAZ MOURVÈDRE 2021 ($450)
A wine with an origin story tying up several strands. The best barrels from two entwined vineyards blended to create a whole new story. Dark berries, even darker plums. Powdered dark chocolate and crushed fennel seed. A hint of grilled meat. An intricately woven tannin lattice. Australia’s winemaking past and future entwined.
96 points