South Australian Pinot Noir Pulls a Surprise

This is supposed to be the state of rich, ripe and spicy Barossa and McLaren Vale shirazes, or intensely flavoured and firmly structured Coonawarra reds! So what are the judges of the Adelaide Hyatt’s South Australian Wine Awards doing by naming a pinot noir, of all things, as Wine of the Year?? Sink me! To what lengths are these people prepared to travel to act like Victorians?

But it was really only a matter of time. The Adelaide Hills has for several years been threatening to make very serious pinot noir. Amongst those makers presently striving to make real pinot noir from Adelaide Hills fruit are Jeffrey Grosset, Steven Henschke, Stephen George Ashton Hills and Tim Knappstein Lenswood Vineyards. It was Knappstein’s 1996 effort which clinched this very remarkable gong for a pinot noir.

Knappstein’s 1993 release pushed the envelope further than any other South Australian pinot noir had managed hitherto. It’s an opulent, flagrant expression of supple, jazzy pinot fruit with enough structure and backbone to make it a five to ten year prospect. 1994’s wine is taking longer to flesh out; 1995 hasn’t quite got the depth of spicy fruit, but the 1996 wine has all the bells, whistles and rattles.

Like the 1993, it suggests that Australia’s finest pinot noir might not eventually be Victorian after all. It presents some of the multi-layered fruit characteristics of the best New Zealand pinot noirs of 1996, with some of the fine-grained astringency that many Australian makers find so hard to achieve in the vineyard. It is reviewed elsewhere in this issue, so I won’t bother raving further.

For a maker who cut his teeth on riesling, traminer, shiraz and cabernet, Tim Knappstein is again creating wine with the enthusiasm of a fresh graduate. He has taken to pinot noir with the intensity that only this grape can inspire. But Knappstein’s affair with pinot noir began when he planted just a single acre of the grape at Lenswood as a trial. If it didn’t work out, a short appointment with a chainsaw and a hundred yards of grafting tape would soon turn it to chardonnay.

The first crop arrived in 1988, coinciding with the appearance at Knappstein’s winery with a French winemaker with Burgundian experience who was thrilled to be given responsibility for the paltry 1.2 tonnes. Knappstein recalls that he hardly slept for the next three days – pressing the grapes, retaining some stems, heating it up to degrees Celsius and plunging the cap between nine and ten times each day.

‘On the fourth day he presented me with this murky-looking fluid which tasted so good we gave it the best oak we could find’, Knappstein remembers. ‘Later on we wrecked the most of the wine so we hardly bottled any of it, but we went out straight away and planted another eight acres.’

The next step was to get the viticulture correct, especially the fruit exposure and cropping levels. Knappstein began to regulate cropping, pruning and sunlight penetration, thinning his bunch number per vine from over fifty to twenty-five, retaining those buds nearest the base of the shoot and creating an even spread throughout the canopy. He estimates his yields are reduced from around five tonnes per acre to less than three and he’s not above thinning later if the crop appears to be heading above three again. He also manipulates shading with a mechanical leaf-plucker and has trellised all his pinot noir into vertical shoot positions.

Knappstein commenced with three clones: the upright D5V12 which isn’t fashionable in Victoria and the industry-standard MV6, while his first acre was later discovered to be the little-known clone, D4V2. Knappstein likes his D5V12 for its lifted and attractive raspberry and strawberry fruit characters and its suppleness. As one might expect, the MV6 develops more presence and tannin, with darker fruit characters. 1998 should see the first commercial yields of the ‘Burgundy’ clones 114 and 115, although Knappstein is careful of expecting too much from them. ‘They will add an extra dimension of flavour and complexity, they’re not suddenly going to make DRC’, he says.

Once in the winery, Knappstein gently crushes bunches to give around 15 ‘loose juice’, the rest of the berries remaining intact. Four to five days cool maceration precedes fermentation with around 10 stems retained. The wine is kept on skins for a total of 14-15 days to develop a finer and better integration of tannins. ‘As the vineyard gets older and we manage it better we find we achieve better colours and tannins’, says Knappstein.

Today the Lenswood Vineyards Pinot Noir receives 50 new oak and 50 second use, split roughly evenly between Alliers, Vosges and TronAais from Seguin-Moreau and D&J.

The 1996 vintage was no fluke. A culmination of the past eight years of learning, it confirms what most people believe about making serious pinot noir: you need to build your experience before you can build your wine. Aware that the most readily popular of his previous wines was the 1993 vintage, Knappstein deliberately sought to commence with fruit of similar ripeness and concentration. The season clearly helped, for the crop was reduced to less than 2 tonnes per acre, harvested just on or below 14 degrees Baume. The consequent depth of flavour was then embellished with the extended time on skins to enhance palate length and integration.

‘At the end of the day, our vineyard and the winemaking have grown up a bit’, he says. But what’s next? Please login to post comment