Interview: Yering Station Winemaker, Tom Carson

Tom Carson is widely rated as one of the top young winemaking talents in Victoria. His relatively short career began with Tim Knappstein in Clare, before he moved to the Yarra Valley, working at Coldstream Hills, then Yarra Edge and now at Yering Station. There he continues his involvement with the Yarra Edge label and is also heavily involved in the making of the excellent Yarrabank sparkling wines in conjunction with the small Champagne house of Devaux. He’s also worked a few vintages in Burgundy and spent the 1996 vintage at Devaux. I’ve long been an admirer of Yarra Edge wines, although the brand took a long time to gain widespread acceptance within the trade and public awareness. When the owners of Yering Station, the Rathbone family, took out a long-term lease on Yarra Edge, Tom Carson went with them. The results in 1997 of his first vintage in the brand-new winery at Yering Station, the first wines made on this property for around 90 years, were simply awesome.

You made a great start with Yering Station’s reserve red wines in 1997. How does their future look?

Looking back, it was a great vintage. 1998 was also excellent for red wines, pinot noir especially. To date we’ve just made reserve quality reds from pinot noir and shiraz, but there is an intention to get into Bordeaux red varieties. Our dilemma is the quality of fruit from the 20 year-old and naturally low cropping cabernet sauvignon and merlot vines at Yarra Edge. We want to maintain it as a single vineyard wine, and until we get better material than it produces we just can’t justify a reserve cabernet for Yering Station. Yarra Edge is a great site and its vines have been treated pretty hard over their lives – it took six years before their first crop. We did get a really good straight cabernet from Yering Station in 1999 which might become a reserve wine, and if we find it does need some merlot we’ll put it in there.

Quality places a limits on the amount of wine we can sell as reserves. We’re releasing our 1998 Reserve Pinot Noir in March which runs to around 650 dozen. We’re only doing this in years I think are worthy, so from time to time we may not have a reserve pinot for two years or so.

Which wines are your role models today?

Phillip Jones always makes some stunning pinot and I always enjoy Mount Mary’s as well. It’s been amazingly consistent since the 1970s. Mount Mary is such a benchmark; you strive to create that sort of quality, and whether you do that is for others to judge. That you can still enjoy a cabernet from the late 1970s from Mount Mary is no mean feat.

With chardonnay I look to Burgundy. I think we are making exciting chardonnays in the Yarra, where we have this great barrel ferment and lees contact style without too much malolactic character or else no malolactic at all. But although we’re certainly producing very good quality, the excitement levels aren’t too high at the moment with chardonnay. Virtually every Australian region makes great chardonnay, so it’s getting harder to make a wine that stands out.

I really like the wild aromas of our 1997 Reserve Chardonnay. They stood out from day one. It has much to do with the influence of wild yeasts bringing complexity to chardonnay and it’s exciting for us to grapple with. I’m not over the moon about using wild yeasts in red wine yet, for they don’t produce mainstream sort of flavours.

The Yarra Valley isn’t that well known for its shiraz. What sort of wine are you trying to make from the relatively young vineyards you have access to?

Shiraz isn’t likely to become a major Yarra variety, but if people understand the style it can be very popular. It certainly makes lovely wines to drink when young and they can age well too as people like Bailey Carrodus of Yarra Yering, who has been making them for a few years, can show.

I’m focussing on that spicy pepper sort of style, coupled with French oak, which fits into more of the savoury end of spectrum than the big sweet plummy Barossa style which is matured with US oak. We’ll focus more on achieving fleshy tannins. The hotter the site and the more exposed it is, the more potential it has, but vine age is a big part of any wine we are making here. Once we hit ten years old – and we have some original 10-11 year old plantings here – you can certainly see the difference. De Bortoli have realised that too.

Young vine wine is often very pretty while it’s young, but it doesn’t stand the test of time. It can look great after vintage, but if it’s given some decent age in barrel then its true colours come through. Older vine material has density and concentration which you don’t experience from young vineyards, so that’s the challenge for Yering. We have a lot of our own vineyard now and we’re maintaining our young vines to keep crops low. We’re putting in the work to get good quality.

What sort of cropping levels are you aspiring towards?

We crop between 3.0-3.5 tonnes per acre off most vineyards and have some blocks designated for reserve wines on particularly good sites where we’re aiming for below 1.5-2.0 tonnes. Our reserve wines start in the vineyard.
What are the key things that have to be done to make great wine in the Yarra Valley?

Site, crop level and good vineyard management are the main issues, and understanding in the winery precisely what you are trying to do with that fruit and what you are going to end up with. You need a direction to focus on with winemaking – that’s the key to what we do here, gaining in experience from year to year with the same block of vineyard and honing the winemaking to match what the fruit is producing. While I was at Yarra Edge I was the only employee there and as such did all the vineyard work and all the winemaking. It was a great experience for me to tie the two together.

What are the main challenges facing you today?

Creating a style here and developing the reputation of Yering Station. The biggest challenge is to maintain quality, especially in making medium to large batches of pinot noir and maintaining a standard. De Bortoli show it can be done. Yarra Valley fruit has a natural balance and tends to make wines both very enjoyable while young and with a great capacity to age. The task is in isolating out special batches like reserve wines which we make for cellaring, since there’s such a demand to have wine that tastes good when released.

The new varieties coming in provide some interest, for we’ve planted sangiovese and nebbiolo and viognier and we’re expecting some fruit next vintage. Who knows what these grapes could do? We’ve also even sourced some furmint the grape behind Hungarian Tokaji for some excitement. Please login to post comment