Tasmania’s Wine Doctor

There are plenty of better-known names in Tasmanian wine than Andrew Hood, but that’s the way he likes it. He’s a quiet, thoughtful type of a guy who has in all possibility made a greater spread of different Tasmanian wine than anyone else. He’s a contract winemaker who makes between seventy to eighty different batches of wine for about thirty vineyards each year at his winery near Cambridge, found between Hobart and Sorell. Some are well enough known and distributed that you may have heard of them, such as Meadowbank, Spring Vale, Elsewhere, Winstead and Providence, but others you certainly won’t have, since it doesn’t matter to Hood how small some of his clients are.

Can you figure out what these wineries have in common: Cooinda Vale, Coombend Estate, Geebin Vineyard, Herons Rise Vineyard, Jollymont, Kinvarra Estate, Lake Barrington Estate, Laurel Bank, Milford Vineyard, Nandroya, Patrick Creek, the Pembroke Wine Company, Richmond Park and Yaxley Estate? Each lists as their winemaker a certain A. Hood. It’s quite okay; I haven’t heard of most of them either. Add to this his own nationally distributed brand of Wellington, and you’ll get some idea of what it’s like to be Andrew Hood. Darned busy and potentially very confusing, if you ask me!

A former wine scientist and microbiologist, he also lectured to winemaking students at the Riverina College at Wagga during his stint there from 1977 to 1989. It was while he was running short winemaking courses in NSW and Victoria that he saw the need for a professional winemaking service in new wine regions.

‘I developed the idea that sooner or later the little vineyards would have to find somebody to make their wines and that they would not be able to justify the cost of building a winery or employing a full-time winemaker’, says Hood. Being a native Tasmanian he had kept in touch with the expansion there and with many of the people involved. ‘So I jumped in deep and started a contract winemaking business. Early 1990 I got six ‘yeses’ and did my first vintage in a corner of the shed at Moorilla Estate, about sixteen tonnes in total. These days I’m doing around 360 tonnes for over thirty vineyards and since I don’t have any more capacity, I have to turn people away’, he says.

The design for the winery at Cambridge was entirely dictated by flexibility and small batches, some as tiny as 500 litres. His larger runs are a comparatively Amazonesque 12,000 litres, making around 1300 cases of wine. He controls temperature by moving small tanks in and out of a large temperature control room rather than by running brine lines to large stationary tanks.

My favourite of Hood’s Wellington labels is his Riesling. He describes the style as floral and citrusy, rather than big and fat, and I entirely agree. The wines have flesh and structure, but the sort of perfume and flavour profile you’d expect of rieslings from New Zealand and Alsace, taking them right out of Australian mainstream. Hood enjoys their slow development and ‘finer range’ of flavours, which he describes as more floral against the typically oily and keroseney qualities acquired by warmer vineyard wines. The 1999 vintage 18.7/20 is the best I have tasted, a spectacular wine, all floral and musk, with a superbly long, tangy palate of fresh citrus sherbet and apple, finishing clean and steely. Keep it until 2007-2011 if you can. The 1998 retails around $20.

Hood likens Tasmanian chardonnay to European styles, especially to Chablis. ‘They’re more limey and citrusy, with melon flavours, not the peachy characters of warmer areas. They’re also more restrained and don’t do as well in wine shows in competition with bigger, fatter warmer climate wine, but they do lend themselves to food’, he says. Again, his 1999 is possibly his best yet, a wine so piercing and crisp it’s like biting into a ripe apple. Bright, tangy citrus and lightly tropical fruit flavours are carefully married with lightly smoky vanilla oak with a background of butter and cream, before a lingering aftertaste of lemony acids. It’s rated 17.9 and will certainly improve until 2004-2007. The 1998 sells for $25. Typical of Hood’s chardonnays, they’re made without any malolactic influence, since it’s his personal view that when you can get primary fruit flavours of such attraction, why make them into ‘big butterscotchy things that don’t taste much of chardonnay?’

Since he makes about thirty of them, Hood is in a fine position to comment on Tasmanian pinot noir. He believes Tasmanian producers are heading towards more fruit-driven wines, rather than more ‘feral cheap Burgundian styles’ and that the market is beginning to respond. There’s certainly been an improvement in the understanding of what ripeness is all about in Tasmania and you don’t see as many red wines with greenish and under-ripe flavours despite good alcoholic strengths.

Hood says that if you begin with good pinot fruit you don’t have to ‘do anything special’ in the winery. ‘If you have good fruit, pinot is not a difficult variety. The cliched business you hear of the heartbreak grape happens when fruit is not grown in the right areas and you have to push and shove to make it produce anything.

‘With good fruit it’s a pushover and you do get real complexity. You don’t need stalks and whole bunches. I use no whole bunches and virtually no pre-maceration fermentation. Early on it was an expedience for me, since I didn’t have the space or resources or time to start these refinements for at least 30 differnet batches of pinot. So given that they get the same treatment, it’s amazing we get such a different range of styles at the end of the day.’

Wellington’ 1998 Pinot Noir 17.7, drink 2000-2003, $27 is a fresh, complex and generously flavoured fleshy young pinot for early drinking. Its bright ripe raspberry and cherry fruit and fine tannins accompany quite an expression of earthy, spicy undergrowth influence, despite Hood’s lack of encouragement for them. It’s still early days for the minty 1999 vintage 17.2, drink 2001-2004, which might yet develop additional weight and richness. It’s a little hard at the finish, but there’s sufficient ripe cherry, plum and raspberry fruit to suggest extra potential.

Hood’s most idiosyncratic wine is his Iced Riesling, a delicate and distinctive dessert wine made from exactly the same juice as his dry riesling. It’s freeze concentrated to about half original volume – with twice its original sweetness and intensity of flavour – before fermentation. This way Hood makes a crisp, clean dessert wine of around beerenauslese sweetness, but relatively free from botrytis influences. The 1999 17.9, drink 2004-2007, $22 per 375 ml is a delicious example, fragrant and seductive with musky apple and pear flavours, wonderful length of intense tropical and citrusy fruit, before a sweet finish which is anything but excessively saccharine.

Wellington is an infant brand with some very good wine and undoubted potential. It will be interesting to watch, especially as Hood says that from the 2000 vintage he has ‘pinots that look like cabernet and cabernets that look like I don’t know what’. Andrew Hood may find, as have other technicians before him, that to reach the absolute limits of their potential his chardonnays and pinot noirs may have to get a little more ‘dirty’ in the winery, but irrespective of that, Wellington offers the buyer a really well made and consistent selection of fine table wines sourced from excellent Tasmanian vineyards. Please login to post comment