Garry Crittenden

Garry Crittenden is an intense, engaging and tireless participant in the wine industry. Having previously established and then sold a very successful chain of gardening stores, he found an immediate and all-consuming focus for his passion for horticulture as one of the second wave of viticultural pioneers on the Mornington Peninsula.

From its first plantings in 1982 Dromana Estate was a model vineyard. Like many other Peninsula makers who commenced by planting a majority of red Bordeaux varieties, Crittenden quickly changed course more towards those of Burgundy. And although he would concede that he has gradually reduced his yields to create wines of the quality to satisfy himself, Dromana’s wine has always been amongst his region’s finest.

Any lingering doubts about Crittenden’s ability to mix it with the best in contemporary Victorian chardonnay and pinot noir were comprehensively removed with Dromana Estate’s Reserve Chardonnay and Reserve Pinot Noir, wines he first made in 1994 and which achieved an exceptional level of quality in 1997. Made entirely from the Dromana Estate vineyard, Crittenden augments the richness of flavour and underlying structure of low-cropped fruit with ‘funky, feral characters which balance with the fragrance and classic perfume of pinot noir’.

In 1987 Crittenden introduced what has become his ‘Schinus’ range of lively, early-drinking table wines which, apart from providing a necessary source of early cashflow for an expanding business, offer vibrant, fresh flavours at an affordable price. The wines are made from fruit sourced from various Victorian regions and are these days made under Crittenden’s supervision and control at a larger Victorian winery.

You might have thought that this would satisfy satisfy most people who enter the wine industry after a previous and successful career. But then, in the late 1980s, Crittenden discovered Italian wine, big time.

For it’s the making of Australian wines from Italian varieties that has truly fired Crittenden’s passion for wine. To work closely with growers in different regions in Victoria to tailor-make fruit on the vine suited to making into identifiably Italian regional styles using a winemaking headspace more Italian than Australian provides an intellectual and practical challenge that Crittenden simply cannot resist.

‘I never wanted to make them, but would just buy bottles and taste them, not having a clue where they came from or what they should taste like. I realised was floundering with them and couldn’t come to grips with the difference. Now all I can think of is “vive la difference”.’ So, having spent a vested deal of time and money becoming more familiar with Italian wines in the company of those selling and making them, he found himself extolling their virtues in a chance conversation with Viv Thomson from Best’s at Great Western.

Thomson had made a wine from dolcetto for years and was finding hard to sell, so Crittenden bought some fruit in 1992, making a vareital Dolcetto which was released in his Schinus range. He then began to source nebbiolo from Fred Pizzini in the King Valley, whom he later asked to plant sangiovese, and purchased barbera from Arnie Pizzini. By 1994 the Schinus label was becoming so overcrowded that Crittenden initiated his ground-breaking ‘i’ range of Italian varietals.

Simply put, this is one of the most strikingly different, arresting and thought-provoking collections of Australian wine. As a collection it’s streets ahead of any other Australian maker. It now comprises a deliciously bone-dry Arneis, a virtually extinct Piedmontese white variety, a complex, chewy rose Rosato, a Dolcetto redolent of sweet cherries and violets now sourced from the King Valley, a Sangiovese that could have stepped straight off the plane from Tuscany, a typically savoury, nicoteney Barbera, and a muscular and easy under-estimated ‘Riserva’ blend of Nebbiolo and Barbera, a dense, concentrated wine suggestive of bitumen and dark cherries.

It could be tempting to think that Crittenden has simply stepped onto a bandwagon that was always going to build in momentum, but the truth is far different. From the outset of the reawakened interest and awareness of these varieties in Australia, he was there, turning up at every tasting and exhaustively researching and cataloguing all the known vineyards in Australia in which even the smallest number of Italian vines were planted.

A couple of years ago Crittenden was awarded a $5,000 fellowship from the NSW Wine Press Club to research the most suitable combinations of Italian grape variety and Australian wine region which culminated in co-authoring a very comprehensive small book entitled Italian Winegrape Varieties in Australia, released in 1999, certain to become the benchmark reference for new participants in these grapes in Australia.

Gary Crittenden has broken new ground in Australian viticulture and winemaking. His efforts to inspire other people to follow his lead and his willingness to share what he has learned with anyone keen enough to listen are founded in the very best traditions of the wine industry in Australia. Please login to post comment