Not everyone is born into wine, though if it’s your beer, it must be a huge advantage if you were lucky enough to be. Simon Grant and Helen Murray of Traviarti were not. Or was this lucky? Perhaps if born into some sort of vinous orthodoxy, with the tunneling of thought and focus into what was already there, the prevailing group think that exists in all pursuits, Traviarti would never have happened.
Nebbiolo’s Australian story is short and largely unsuccessful. There wasn’t and still isn’t a single region that defines or champions the variety, and very few producers up to this point (the mid 2000’s) had made a convincing example. Nothing really has changed. Tasting through a range of Australian nebbiolos is like tasting through a series of over priced and unconvincing dry red. But Traviarti was the first to break ground. The first really wonderful Nebbiolo to come from Australia. Nebbiolo isn’t like any other variety Australian vignerons had come across before and it would take all of Simon’s love, obsession, deduction, instinct and the contrarian mind of someone not raised in a temperature controlled stainless steel fermenter to make it happen.
Asking Simon by phone why he had chosen his site, he remarked that it had a house and he could afford it. Elaborating he told me:
“There is a narrow window where Nebbiolo can work in Oz and it harks back to the question of where it grows and trying to approximate that. The beginnings are all speculation. Neb has evolved in the north of Italy and its humid. It’s also not hot. But you do need enough heat to ripen, but not too hot to harm the grapes as they ripen, which is late in the season. So, warm in autumn, but not blistering hot in summer. Altitude tends to ameliorate the heat. For example. Wangaratta is about 45kms from Beechworth and sits much lower, hit 47 degrees in the summer of 2020 and had a week, where the peaks were not below 37 degrees. At our place in Beechworth, the temperature hit a high of 38 on one day and yes it was hot, but never extreme. So that’s a result of altitude. Beechworth was by this time established and there was no point in looking at far flung places. People wouldn’t take you seriously.”
Humidity? Humidity makes growing grapes hard. Humidity is the harbinger of disease, encouraging botrytis, downey and powdery mildew. “I have had plenty of truly great wines made from grapes with disease. In Australia there is an insanely fearful ideal that fruits gotta be pristine. Well, that’s simply not true.” Simon first got the idea of humidity and grape growing from Phillip Jones of Bass Phillip, Australia’s ground breaking Gippsland estate.
“Most varieties that ripen in humid conditions self select out the grapes with thick skins. Now neb has thin skins, but lots of tannin, and tannin is its disease prevention mechanism. So in Beechworth we have altitude, or at least some parts do. Beechworth has 2 main soil types, granite derived soils and mudstone shales. Now the mudstone shales can run very deep and have good water holding capacity. Neb is a vigorous variety, so we need plenty of water for its canopy, and we want canopy to encourage humidity.” Now, this is where you have to think differently. “Almost all vineyards look tidy. My row spacing was 2.7 and my canopy was over 2 metres high and 1.5 metres thick. At times there’s no way you’re getting a fuckin tractor down there. So at the risk of labouring the point. No leaf plucking, hedging or trimming. You stand in the rows surrounded by canopy in summer and it’s like the tropics. The canopy is transpiring like fuck. In a standard Oz hot, dry Nebbiolo vineyard you end up with wines that are diffuse, and tannins lacking density because the plant hasn’t had to defend itself, and the best wines off these vineyards are the wet and cold years, not the ideal ones”.
Clonal material was and still is an issue in Australia. Recently, I was lucky enough to taste a huge breadth of Nebbiolo’s from across Italy, not only Barolo and Barbaresco, but Ghemme, Boca, Gattinara, Bramaterra, Cossato, Roero and Valtellina. What was clear, was that alongside regional diversity, was a diversity of tradition and method, and an enormous variety of clonal material, and some of the most prized were clones that gave off light colours.
“The first question you ask yourself is what the best clones are and as soon as you do that you limit yourself. The world’s more complicated than that. People were down on the idea of clonal material, but from all the conversations I had, the most common threads were; what gives the best colour. Well, Nebbiolo’s not that fucking dark. So I went to see Fred Pizzini. No one had worked with Nebbiolo as much as Fred had and he liked the clone 230, so I got 230.” So the first Nebbiolo arrives in the 1970’s from UC Davis and is first planted in Mudgee (I believe this vineyard was ripped out by the Oatley family after their purchase of Montrose, but I haven’t been able to confirm this).” In the early 2000’s Chalmers with the aid of Alberto Antonini brought over a selection of what he thought the best clones are, so now we do have a bigger selection to choose from. Apart from 230, I chose 3 clones that appeared ‘traditional’. As a side story 230 produces large bunches. There’s lots of thinning of fruit, not so much to keep the yields down, but the vine can’t ripen all it produces. I once cut a bunch off at véraison with a weight of 1.7kgs! Now they roughly double in size from that point, so that gives you an indication of what 230 can do. But this is one of the calamities of Australian viticulture, the lack of diversity in the vineyard. Almost any clone can bring something positive and in the right season 230 can be the best performed”.
So many threads of thought, belief and luck. You have to strike it lucky. The site has proven to be wonderful, but Simon and Helen weren’t to know this when they purchased and first stuck a vine in the ground. So much has to go your way. Simon enlisted the invaluable help of Chris Catlow, a local vigneron (and tiler) of Sentio wines, bringing with him an awesome palate and technical expertise. In Simon’s own words, “when all goes well, great. But when it all goes to shit, you need the chemistry”. My first question regarding winemaking was if he controlled the temperature of his ferments, a stupid one as it turns out, the answer “yeah sure, I open the door”.
As it happens, words can be open to interpretation. We discussed the notion of natural winemaking and low intervention. “I have an extremely low tolerance to Brettomycces. Decisions are interventions, and we are constantly making decisions. The most critical decision is picking. That critical moment and it is a moment. Fruit, acid and tannin. I don’t believe in multiple passes at differing ripeness. Harmony is fundamental, and that can only be attained by picking high quality fruit at just the right moment. When I first started, winemakers didn’t talk about balance and harmony because it’s fucking hard. I knew we were in business when in 2017 I picked a grape and tasted. I had goosebumps. It tasted like Nebbiolo. Acid, fruit and tannin were all there, well all in harmony”.
And what about the technical side? We’ve already spoken about temperature control.
“The industry is hamstrung by strong dogmas. For most of my career I played music, so I’m used to improvisation. The decisions you make are philosophical ones, and ones that reflect the style of wine you want to make. Winemakers are obsessed about colour. I’m not. We are always interacting, always asking questions. Tannins are fundamental to Nebbiolo, like I said before, a natural defence mechanism the plant has evolved. For me, I look at the density of tannin, shape of tannin and volume of tannin. Time on skins is crucial, after fermentation”
How long, how do you know? “You keep tasting until the tannins ameliorate. I don’t macerate. I’m not looking for colour or tannin extraction. Time on skins means exactly that. A lot of winemakers plunge and pump. Post ferment, I put the lid on, literally allowing it to sit. Gentle handling if you’ve got the fruit right. Any interference needs to be subtle. Remember, it doesn’t have to be like the last one.” “In recent times concrete for fermentation and ceramic for maturation has been really exciting for achieving purity unimpeded by wood. With Nebbiolo this for me is the holy grail, barrels of any size generally have more impact.”
Here are some of my observations taken from a recent Traviarti retrospective, where we tasted all his Nebbiolo’s. That all the wines had aged very well, and would continue to do do. None of the wines looked tired, or indeed had ‘peaked’. For how long they will age, and how well, is still an unknown but the oldest, off very young vines and I’m sure Simon wouldn’t mind me saying it, he at this early stage, an inexperienced vigneron, were still particularly youthful. Secondly, that variation, not of quality, but of vintage was apparent. Thirdly, and related to the last point was the diversity of opinions around the table. Bearing in mind, the tasters were all seasoned wine professionals, including three of Australia’s most respected wine critics, and yet there was no consensus in regards to what the best wines were or personal favourites. I have never, ever, been to a tasting where this has happened. And I have gone to a lot of tastings.
Vintage 2023 is the last for Traviarti. It’s over. Writing this, I wonder if I’ll ever write about Simon Grant again. I truly hope so. The best winemakers are instinctive, using their palates and their brains. George Smiley once commented that one can get too caught up in technique. Australia’s first seriously excellent Nebbiolo was made here, for less than 10 vintages, but Simon and Helen have achieved several lifetimes worth. It’s hard to ask wine producers to take risks or more precisely, to think and work differently from established industry norms. Traviarti did exactly that, without which, they never could have made such sublime wines. Most people never make a go of wine, the cost of entry is so high and competition is fierce. But for Australian Nebbiolo, great Nebbiolo, Traviarti is the undisputed don. There have been others, good ones too, but none more convincing than Traviarti. It’s only the beginning.
Traviarti Black Springs Nebbiolo 2023
Traviarti’s Simon Grant helped establish this vineyard, which will no doubt be a source of great Nebbiolo. Considering how young the vines are, this is remarkable. Very aromatic, indeed more so than the estate wine, with crushed roses, compote of English summer fruits, pickled beetroot and ruby grapefruit. Gorgeous open palate, shaped like the draw of a longbow, with a vein of acidity present from the first tangy red fruits to the close of finessed tannins. And it is tannic, but they are so beautiful and harmonised with lashings of fruit and baking spices you almost don’t notice. Seriously complex, the flavours begin to un-weave in the glass, with darker hedge fruits, tensioned by cherry cola, aniseed, fresh compost and citrus twang. Total bargain!
Understated aromatics, but nothing a good swirl and cupping of glass won’t sort out! Black/hedge and red fruits, ruby grapefruit, a little reductive, smokey, alpine herbs, licorice and pink peppercorns. A totally different beast to the Black Springs; deeper and more brooding. Wider in shape, the fruit plusher and very complex, sweet but very tangy, so the spectrum’s more like red cherry, blackberry, redcurrant and cranberry. More savoury, grown up, the baking spices, tar, florals and earthier elements weave with the fruit, acid and tannin. Traviarti’s tannins are different. They are not Piedemontese, and I mean this in a good way. Gripping and mouthwatering, but not bitter and with every single release, harmonised, the month of idling on skins has worked wonders. Still elemental at this stage, ironically the most backward upon release, when one considers this will be the last. At its best when? One of the finest, no question, but in need of some time in the bottle. We’ll miss this.
