When these friends put their heads together, Tassie wine magic happens
Two years since Haddow + Dineen’s pinot noir grapes were devoured by a gaggle of geese, the winemaker has bounced back with a riesling masterclass.
Nick Haddow, cheesemaker, brewer, dairy farmer and perpetual motion machine for the promotion of a particularly Tasmanian way of looking at life, knew he’d end up in wine somehow. “I’d always been an interloper on the fringes of wine,” he says. “I had to dive in eventually.”
When he did, he was clever enough to push someone in with him. Jeremy Dineen was well established as one of Tasmania’s leading winemakers when they decided to stress-test their friendship by founding a wine business. The first releases under the Haddow + Dineen label sprang from the 2018 vintage and were born in Dineen’s coast-clinging vineyard near York Town, where the Tamar spills into the sea. The vineyard sits on uncommon soils, composed mainly of white quartzite gravels with small patches of orange clay. There’s little organic matter, and it retains water about as well as a tissue paper teapot. That vineyard’s modest 3ha, let alone its yield-limiting location and geology, meant that other fruit sources would be required.
“We won’t buy fruit in,” says Dineen of the plan they hatched. “We’ll only work with vineyards we can lease and manage ourselves.” One such Tamar Valley vineyard supplies shiraz (a minor Tasmanian variety) while another further south, near Sorell, adds another pinot noir to the stable as well as some scintillating riesling. Dineen knows the site well. He bears a scar from a picking mishap back in the 1990s when friends of his parents owned it. New owners saw accommodation potential and were keen on the property’s orchards, but didn’t know what to do with the vineyard – so Haddow and Dineen snapped up a long lease and set about reworking the place to their exacting standards. A flock of marauding geese devouring most of the pinot noir in 2023 was an inconvenient endorsement of their efforts.
The wines are distinctively Tasmanian, though not necessarily in the way we’ve come to expect. There’s a compelling off-kilter personality to them that speaks both to Haddow’s intention to “dabble where we can to provide a different narrative”, and to Dineen’s capacity to move the dial in intriguing directions.
HADDOW + DINEEN ‘SEHNSUCHT’ RIESLING 2024
$45
A masterclass in texture. Wild ferment and extended time on skins coax firm phenolics that ratchet up the tension in the wine without turning it hard and mean. The citrus elements seem drawn from the pithy parts rather than zesty juice. A little ginger spice lift, too. It might just be the best Tassie riesling I’ve tasted.
12% alcohol, 96 points
HADDOW + DINEEN ‘PRIVATE UNIVERSE’ PINOT NOIR 2023
$60
Hand-picked, 50% whole-bunch fermented, wild yeast, unfined and unfiltered. A wine of taut wires and fine filaments. Lacy, transparent, finely etched. Cranberry and rhubarb, blood orange and a little warm spice. Highly strung acidity and talcy tannins. Achingly beautiful.
13.5% alcohol, 95 points
HADDOW + DINEEN ‘CROWS DESCENDED’ SHIRAZ 2022
$60
This wine encapsulates Haddow’s “different narrative” ideal. The ubiquitous shiraz in the one place you least expect it. Sinewy, not skinny. Fine-framed but shapely. Black and blue berries, a generous dusting of spices and a superfine swathe of highly pixelated tannins tapering the finish.
13.5% alcohol, 93 points
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