Winemaker Chris Hatcher – and Hatch wines – is a rising star a long time coming
After a soaring five-decade career, much of it spent as chief winemaker at Treasury Wine Estates, the artful Chris Hatcher finally puts his name on the label. The results are superb.
I suspect more Australian drinkers have encountered a wine made under Chris Hatcher’s eye than any other winemaker in the past 50 years. It’s both the longevity and scope of his career that makes it so. Hatcher was a kid from a sober Methodist household whose path towards a science degree detoured through the Australian Wine Research Institute and eventually a job at Kaiser Stuhl in the Barossa Valley. In his first year, colour television arrived and the Whitlam Government went.
From there he joined the winemaking team at Orlando where his growing reputation, particularly for white wines, caught the attention of the enigmatic Wolf Blass. Blass recruited Hatcher in 1987 and a decade later, during a period of corporate consolidation in Australian wine, Hatcher found himself chief winemaker for Treasury Wine Estates, with overarching responsibility for not only Wolf Blass but Penfolds, Wynns, Rosemount, Coldstream Hills, Seppelt, Lindeman’s and more. If anyone reading this in The Australian Weekend Magazine has lips untouched by these, they’ve got lost trying to find Jeremy Clarkson’s column …
After that kind of career, a quiet retirement would be a deserved reward – but Hatcher doesn’t work that way. “I think the thing I’ve enjoyed most in my career is the way wine brings you into contact with so many people,” he explains. “I just couldn’t imagine giving that up. And I’ve been married for 50 years and don’t really fancy the idea of getting divorced. I reckon that would be on the cards if I just sat around and got in the way.”
There’s a significant change in scale in this third act of Hatcher’s winemaking life. Small quantities of wines matching up his favoured varieties sourced from places that grow them best. “I want to keep my hand in making the wines I like to drink.”
It’s hard to imagine a wine brand starting out with more runs on the board than this. It’s all the scope of a big winemaking career refracted and refocused into something very personal and full of potential. A rising star a long time coming.
HATCH WATERVALE RIESLING 2024
$35
Full and fleshy, a wine leaning into the more generous side of Watervale. Bath salts and blood orange, ruby grapefruit and an underlying hum of spice. The finest coating of beeswax. Ripeness, a relative roundness, but still abundant and energetic acidity driving the wine.
12% alcohol, 93 points
HATCH EDEN VALLEY RIESLING 2024
$35
Thrilling and precise. The full assiette of lime, sharp segments, punchy zest, heady blossom. Some jasmine and a faint suggestion of tarragon too. Racy, taut and lively. A wine of fine acidity and inherent tension. Tight and linear before the emergence of a taut, quartzy crunch through the finish.
11.3% alcohol, 95 points
HATCH ‘VESEY’ MCLAREN VALE SHIRAZ 2023
$55
A seriously supple and sinewy shiraz. Contemporary and classic all at once. Beautifully ripe red and black berries, some woody spices, cocoa powder and vanilla pod, a little salted licorice too. Freshness and energy; a lovely rippling, assured momentum as it flows across the palate.
14.5% alcohol, 94 points
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