Jim Brayne

In 1973 a local youth by the name of Jim Brayne turned up at McWilliams’Yenda winery near Griffith to commence his summer vacation job in the cellars. He had no particular interest in wine whatsoever, but was keen to save some dollars before he started a university degree in business economics. He never started that degree. He stayed at McWilliams instead. And, less than a decade after completing a winemaking degree at Roseworthy College in 1977 he became the company’s chief winemaker in 1986.

Brayne’s appointment to the top winemaking position in McWilliams came during a dynamic time in the company’s history which also involved Doug McWilliam becoming production director and Phil Ryan taking on the key position as winemaker for Mount Pleasant. Within the next few years the company had bought the Barwang vineyard 1989, Brand’s Coonawarra 1994 and Lillydale Vineyards 1994, heralding a substantial reawakening as a maker of quality wine. Himself a regular judge on the wine show circuit, Brayne is especially proud that McWilliams has been the most successful exhibitor at each of the last six Sydney wine shows.

It’s also important to Brayne and indeed the McWilliams approach to its business that with a development like the purchase of Brand’s Laira, the Brand family remains intimately involved. ‘It wasn’t a takeover in which we showed a disregard of the skills base already there. We’ve achieved things at Brand’s as a team and not as individuals. Winemaking is about trying to get the best out of everybody, especially in a large company.’

Brayne says he is more than compensated for the loss of hands-on winemaking contact during vintage by the experience of helping other people develop their own potential as winemakers. Deeply committed to the cause of providing further academic training for those involved in the wine industry in the Riverina, Brayne considers his involvement in the course structure at Griffith, which presently involved more than a hundred local employees, as important a facet of his career as the winemaking itself. ‘If this area is to move more towards the premium end of the industry every cellar hand will have to know what’s going on’, he says.

Jim Brayne is inextricably linked to substantial movement in quality across McWilliams’ entire folio, from the Hanwood range to the company’s emerging collection of new premium wines like Brand’s Stentiford’s Shiraz 1996 and the McWilliams Limited Release Botrytis Semillon 1997. Brayne describes his approach to wines like the very successful and affordable Hanwood Chardonnay as taking a small winery approach to large-scale production, all the while keeping a close eye on the economics of the process.

‘Half the Hanwood Chardonnay is barrel fermented. It has contact with real oak and is given a genuine period of lees contact. It’s a wine of real style for its price point’, he says. ‘The challenge as a winemaker is to understand the market and the winemaking and working backwards to arrive at a wine of real quality and value.’

It’s with the Brand’s and Barwang wines that Brayne is most proud. The latest Barwang vintages constitute some pretty smart wines, and Brayne has enjoyed the challenge of taking a relatively unknown region and putting it on the map. ‘We’ve been able to carve out a style without being driven by the market and following someone else’s direction. As a winemaker my philosophy is to express the potential of each site and property. At McWilliams we don’t have a corporate style as such; we pride ourselves that you can’t pick our wines as a house style.

‘If you take our shirazes from the Hunter, Coonawarra and Barwang, they each come out as very different wines for they’ve been made with very different approaches and techniques. We’re about expressing the regionality in the wines, which is what enjoying wine and food is all about.’ Please login to post comment