Gary Farr
Nobody in Australia has consistently been making world-class wines from both chardonnay and pinot noir for longer than Gary Farr, winemaker for the highly-rated Bannockburn winery near Geelong in Victoria. Nobody in Australian wine sets himself higher standards to achieve than Farr, and he expects to achieve them, year in, year out. Remarkably, to virtually everyone but himself, he does.
Gary Farr is an exceptionally intelligent individual blessed with a gift given several others of his ilk of being able to distil potentially complex issues down to straightforward, simple pieces of logic. While many winemakers would relish the opportunity to unravel their entire winemaking raison d’etre with the question: ‘What are the styles of wine you are really trying to achieve?’, Farr’s response is typically straight-batted: ‘Something I’d like to drink’.
Why has he focused so strongly on the wines of Burgundy? ‘I went all over France for three months in 1983, to Bordeaux, to Alsace and the Rhone, but I didn’t like what I saw, so I ended up back in Burgundy. There’s more to learn there.’
Farr has spent a lot of time working vintages in Burgundy with people like Jacques Seysses of Domaine Dujac, one of Seysses’ disciples Jean-Pierre de Smet at Domaine de l’Arlot and Christophe Roumier at Domaine Georges Roumier and he’s been strongly influenced in his approach to pinot noir by the techniques he’s observed and participated in there. But to what extent are the Bannockburn pinots shaped by his Burgundian experiences? ‘I originally modelled my approach on Dujac, for in the early days we thought we could make Burgundy, but then we realised that you can only make wine from the grapes from your own vineyard. We make good Bannockburn; they make good Burgundy. Their techniques build more complexity into a wine, which doesn’t make Bannockburn taste any more like theirs, but does give it more quality and character.’
Farr is equally straightforward when discussing chardonnay. ‘I haven’t really been influenced by anyone in particular with chardonnay, other than to pick up general Burgundian techniques like barrel fermentation. But there’s a lot of French chardonnay and generally I’d rather drink my own. I’m aiming for richer flavours and more complexity. A lot of theirs are quite austere and you wonder if they’ll improve.
‘There’s not as much to making white burgundy as there is to pinot noir. I spend no time drinking French white burgundy to see what I’ll do to Bannockburn, but I drink a lot of red burgundy and wonder why I can’t achieve this or get those flavours.
‘What’s holding back many Australian makers of pinot is a lack of knowledge of what they’re trying to achieve. They haven’t drunk a lot of burgundy and haven’t seen what they’re aiming for.’ Farr’s firm, deeply flavoured pinot noirs from the close-planted Serre vineyard at Bannockburn show what he is capable of doing with fruit cropped in a fashion closely modelled to that of a Premier Cru burgundy.
Bannockburn’s Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are such established benchmarks they need little other explanation other than to open them. Their uncompromising character, core of flavour, completeness and artfully constructed complexity accurately reflect the strength of Farr’s not unjustifiable self-confidence in his own abilities. The wines released over the last five years reveal a genuine master winemaker working at the very top of his form.
Sourced from a part of the older chardonnay vineyard planted between 1978-1980, the SRH Chardonnay is the white jewel in Bannockburn’s crown. Picked and tranferred straight into new oak for fermentation, its final cut becomes a personal selection of Farr’s as a sumptuous, deeply-flavoured wine with strength and concentration suggestive of the great vineyards to west of Puligny-Montrachet. Price-wise it did to chardonnay what Yattarna would claim to have done, but quietly, and long before.
Many would be surprised to hear that Farr believes he makes better shiraz than pinot in some years or that it sells faster than anything else he makes. ‘Climatically we’re right on the limits for shiraz here. In some years it’s too warm for pinot, but with shiraz here it’s like being in Burgundy with pinot noir, so there’s a real challenge to it.’
Since the early 1990s Bannockburn’s shiraz has been made virtually like a pinot noir, resulting in supple, deeply flavoured, spicy and fleshy wines of considerable quality and longevity. It’s about as far away as you can get from the porty, oaky caricature of Australian shiraz in such fashion today. With viognier coming on board from his own vineyard adjacent to that of Bannockburn, Farry is enthusiastic about the ‘twist’ it will give Bannockburn’s Shiraz.
Gary Farr has just reworked the Bannockburn winery with new refrigeration and processing systems and eagerly anticipates the new varieties coming on stream from his own vineyard, which will be sold under a separate label. He’s still strongly motivated by the challenges each vintage presents and is deeply committed to the Bannockburn label. Drinkers of premium Australian chardonnay, pinot noir and shiraz could ask for no better news.
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