Lenswood
In the days of vineyard expansion, during the late 1970s, the words on everybody’s lips were ‘Coonawarra cabernet’. Henschke was unique in having cabernet sauvignon planted at Eden Valley and winning wide acclaim for it, so the Coonawarra cabernet lure was not so enticing. But there was another grape variety which was proving to be difficult, namely pinot noir, with chardonnay coming up behind. A really good pinot noir is a dream to drink, with rich wild berry flavours that fill out in the mouth with voluptuous silkiness. Nobody was really succeeding with this style and, although
Australia had developed its own chardonnay style, the palate structure and length was also lacking in the chardonnays. From Prue’s studies at Geisenheim Wine Institute, Germany, she was aware that palate-feel comes from the amount of ‘Extrakt’ or a measure of the soluble solids in a wine such as polysaccherides, glycerols, phenolics and a whole range of other compounds. These two varieties obviously need the less stressed growing season as experienced in the best years in Europe.
Australia’s hot dry summers which produce the big and equally voluptuous shiraz wines wasn’t working for pinot noir. Prue was employed at Roseworthy Agricultural College as a technical assistant in viticulture at the same time that Dr Richard Smart and Peter Dry were summarising the viticultural climates in Australia, and the Adelaide Hills looked good. From Prue’s university days studying botany she knew that the Adelaide Hills was a unique, wetter, more humid, botanically rich region which could not be found anywhere else in South Australia. Why go to Coonawarra when Lenswood could prove to be good vineyard country and was only three-quarters of an hour away?
Frost was a potential problem, hence Prue and Stephen selected land with steeper slopes, covered in apple, cherry and pear trees. The future vineyard was positioned right at the top end of a long beautiful valley of apple orchards and natural forests at an altitude of 550m, an annual rainfall of 1134mm and 15km north-east of Mount Lofty (700m). The area stays green until January and the humidity is greater than the lower-lying regions. They felt like invaders into this peaceful apple kingdom until the 1983 bushfires wiped out the whole orchard and made the changeover to vines easier. Planting began in earnest in 1984.
Now they have pinot noir, chardonnay, riesling, merlot and cabernet sauvignon planted over a 13ha property. Each of these varieties, apart from the cabernet sauvignon that struggles to get to 22° B every year, has achieved excellence because of the flavours and build-up of extract on the palate. The pinot noir vines are still young but the wild berry fruit characters are evident on the voluptuous mouthfeel, and will become more intense with older, more settled vines. The chardonnay goes against the tide with its lighter, honeysuckle to gooseberry characters and great palate structure and length without the dominance of oak. The riesling was the biggest surprise as its fruit character moved from the citrus/lime spectrum of Eden Valley and Clare into the more fragrant citrus blossom/passionfruit flavours. Riesling has always been a food wine, the citrus flavours going so well with seafood, chicken and antipasti - but the Lenswood riesling has an added fragrance and minerality that makes it a very pleasant wine to drink by itself.
The merlot has a rich fleshy structure with spicy berry characters - mulberries come to mind when tasting this wine. This is proving to be the flagship wine style for the Adelaide Hills vineyards. The cooler growing and ripening period of this region suits the variety and produces intense, spicy wines that go so well with lamb and game, especially hare and kangaroo.
The pursuance of quality has been achieved in such a short time, but there is always a cost. The different vineyard management that comes with high rainfall, steep slopes (30-40%), and upright curtain-foliage training has meant pioneering new techniques and different machinery. It is really frustrating at times when they know what needs to be done and no machinery is capable of doing the job. They adopt the ‘minimum soil disturbance’ attitude so vineyard preparation is a whole new ball game. They use pasture grasses as a green sward between the rows, which the Soil Conservation Board considers in a much better light than many other crops such as potatoes and brassicas. They still have a few things to rectify such as achieving a taller curtain of foliage and finding suitable acid soil-tolerant rootstocks to guard against phylloxera.
They have several trials looking at different clones of pinot noir (there are seven, MV6, D5V12, 98V3, and G8V7, including the famous Bernard clones of 114, 115, 774, recently imported from the Burgundy area), chardonnay (five clones: I10V1, Antav 84, and 277, including Burgundian Bernard clones, B95, B96, B76) and merlot (six: D3V14, D3V5, D3V7, 6R, 8R, Q45-14). They also have different types of trellis to cope with high vigour in various spots in the vineyard, such as VSP and Scott Henry. The Lenswood vineyard is on a range of well drained soils consisting of sandy loam over medium clay interspersed with shale fragments overlying a shale bedrock.
Running this vineyard cannot be done from a textbook. It takes a lot of clever thinking and fine adjustment to make it work. It is always going to cost much more to produce grapes from steeper vineyards in wetter regions but at least we are not ruling ourselves out of making some of the best quality pinot noir, chardonnay, riesling and merlot in the country.