This NSW winery is a combination of resourcefulness and fervour
Tasting these wines is akin to a religious experience.
Every week a mountain of wine boxes arrive at my place for appraisal. Occasionally those boxes come with handwritten notes from winemakers, usually expressing how pleased they are with the bottles they’ve placed inside. But the notes from Clonakilla’s Tim Kirk are rather different. A recent missive slipped in with his outstanding new releases was full of enthusiasm and pride for new releases of a different kind. “We are now grandparents, which is the best fun ever!”
It is said, mostly by those who never owned a French bulldog, that you can see an owner in their pet. I’ve often said you can see the maker in their wines. I see Tim Kirk in the best of his. There’s a clarity of thought that shows through in his wines, a deep understanding of where they are born and how that fundamentally shapes their nature. It’s an inheritance from his father John, one of several CSIRO scientists who, in the 1970s, saw a future for viticulture in the Canberra district that conventional winemaking wisdom of the day did not.
And that intellectual foundation is paired with Tim Kirk’s deep religious faith. In cold reality, a winemaker’s religious belief has no bearing on what ends up in the bottle, but this lapsed Catholic, who has always observed Kirk’s nourishment from his faith with a mix of befuddlement and envy, can’t help but see his wines as a kind of offertory. There is a beauty and celebration in them that’s profound.
As a young man he considered the priesthood,but found his thoughts pulled back from heaven by the forces of fermentation. A Jesuit mentor helped him see the service he wanted to give could be just as meaningful through making wine as consecrating it. The Jesuits famously made a great contribution to Australian wine through their Sevenhill winery in the Clare Valley. Keeping Kirk away from the altar and out in the vineyard may be even greater still.
CLONAKILLA RIESLING 2024
$40
A pure and bright riesling, awash with green apples and honeysuckle, lemon verbena and pink grapefruit. There’s a fine and minerally quality to the wine, like lemon soda sucked through a quartz straw. A sprightly frame, long and linear, awash with a fresh, graceful acidity.
12% alcohol; 94 points
CLONAKILLA ‘HILLTOPS’ SHIRAZ 2022
$32
A wine for which Kirk looks beyond his Murrumbateman vineyard, to the Hilltops region around Young. Black cherry and wild raspberry, star ansise and white pepper. Sinewy and softly sappy; dark berry flavours rolling through a supple and velvet-cloaked palate tapered with fine, gritty tannins.
13.5% alcohol; 93 points
CLONAKILLA ‘O’RIADA’ SHIRAZ 2023
$40
While Kirk’s shiraz viognier – about which you’ll hear more from me in coming months – is justly celebrated, this is a light he can keep under a bushel no longer. It is one of Australian wine’s biggest bargains. A exultation of berries and spice: raspberry, blackberry, sandalwood, mace. Sculpted detail, intricate and entwined. Tannins deployed in microfine granules.
13% alcohol; 96 points