Moshos begins the rebirth of Mountadam

When Con Moshos got his first winemaking job, he thought he’d landed the big one. He joined the team at Petaluma where he had the chance to learn from the team assembled by winemaking supremo Brian Croser. During his last ten years at the company, he was Petaluma’s chief winemaker. Then his mate, businessman David Brown, bought Mountadam.

Back in the early 1980s, people who were actively interested in Australian wine knew all about Mountadam. The visionary David Wynn, who had reincarnated Coonawarra’s most historic winery has Wynn’s Coonawarra Estate, had purchased a spectacular site atop a ridge in South Australia’s lofty Eden Valley region, planted a large and innovative vineyard, built what was at the time the most technologically advanced small winery in Australia and handed over the keys to the whole idea to his winemaking wunderkind son, Adam.

It’s a high altitude site, with its highest plantings around 570 metres above sea level. Unlike virtually all Australian vineyards of its time, its 70 ha of vines were planted on hillsides, on cool south and east-facing aspects. Established in the early 1970s, long before chardonnay became popular, Mountadam’s 24 ha of this variety was for several years Australia’s largest chardonnay vineyard. David Wynn also matched four individual clones of chardonnay to particular soil types, and did the same with seven different clones of pinot noir. He was decades ahead of his time.

For the several years in which he was entirely focused on his winemaking, Adam Wynn played his role as well, creating a legacy of complex, powerful chardonnay of rare longevity, as well as a collection of sumptuous, juicy red wines of great fascination and character. Mountadam was an iconic small Australian wine estate, but as it began to interest its owners less, its quality began to dwindle. In a big way.

Then up to the plate stepped the giant French company, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, which paid a very large sum of money in 2000 for a vineyard and a brand in serious decline. The company would have hoped to turn Mountadam into another Cape Mentelle, which it also owns, but the task proved too great. So, in 2005, not because he fancied getting into the wine game, but because he felt strongly enough about the site, David Brown bought Mountadam, which is where we began this tale.

Hearing the news, Con Moshos rang to congratulate his mate. He had visited the winery in 1984 on the same Roseworthy field trip as me and felt strongly about the site’s potential to make world-class wine that could reflect its own particular terroirs. Without really intending to, he was writing himself a job specification. Shortly afterwards, he amicably left Petaluma.

Moshos and Brown now view Mountadam as a long-term work in progress. It’s going to take time for it to produce its best wine, and while neither is in a hurry, Moshos is not wasting a moment. The first thing he did was to employ a geologist who mapped out the vineyard’s three major soil types. Neither is remotely fertile nor has much by way of organic matter. They’re fairly acidic, with a high quartz and mineral content. Armed with this knowledge, there’s going to be a lot of fine-tuning of varieties and clones.

For a start, about 30 ha of the entire vineyard is planted to cabernet sauvignon and merlot, two varieties it doesn’t handle all that well in most seasons. Moshos has already converted some back to riesling which, like shiraz and chardonnay, is a grape for which he has high expectations. At present, less than a tenth of the entire plantings are riesling and shiraz, the two ‘gun’ varieties of Eden Valley, and which are able to make totally distinctive regional styles there. The estate will be producing its own riesling again from 2008 onwards. And while the estate has 8 ha and seven clones of pinot noir, Moshos believes that the months of January and February, which are crucial to the ripening of this variety, are too hot in most seasons.

Clearly, the biggest challenge facing Moshos to date is with chardonnay, the wine for which Mountadam was best known, and whose quality has suffered the greatest through years of neglect. Having decided to harvest and prune by hand, and having taken steps to modernise the winery – including the introduction of grape sorting tables and more contemporary fermentation tanks – Moshos has begun remodelling Mountadam’s chardonnay.

The brand has always been associated with powerful, sumptuous chardonnay of the heavily worked kind but in truth, too many recent vintages have lacked freshness and balance. Moshos, who believes in a ‘discipline about what we do as winemakers’, is cleaning up and fine-tuning the wine, but not at the expense of richness and flavour. It’s early days, and Moshos has only had the chance to make wines in 2006 and 2007, but the two different chardonnays I have tasted from 2006 begin to reflect his ambitions.

Meanwhile, Mountadam’s very stylish, intense and focused 2006 Riesling is on the market. It’s sourced from a nearby low-cropping, hillside and north-facing vineyard that Moshos says ‘has all the right attributes’. It’s a big step forward, and it’s whetting my appetite for the 2008 vintage, harvested from the company’s own vines.

Despite the fact that he’s making only about 20 of the wine he did at Petaluma, Moshos is bullish about the job ahead. ‘Here is a unique and special site with real relevance to Australian wine that was in danger of being allowed to float away’, he says. ‘We want to give it the focus and attention it really deserves.’ So, watch out!

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