Interview – Bob Cartwright

Bob Cartwright is the master winemaker ultimately responsible for Australia’s most coveted white wine, Leeuwin Estate’s Art Series Chardonnay. Since its first vintage in 1980 it has hardly skipped a beat and there has only been a single release, the 1984 vintage, to which I would not have awarded at least a silver medal. Most vintages are easily gold medal standard. Cartwright began his winemaking with Houghton, before brief stint at Kaiser Stuhl, and then to Leeuwin. He reckons that the 44-gallon drum of chardonnay he made from the nursery at Gingin with Charlie Kelly might well be the first chardonnay ever made in WA. It would be hard to argue that since then he has not also made the best.

What stands Leeuwin Estate Chardonnay apart from other preium Australian chardonnay?

Its inherent fruit quality; that’s where it all starts. We get some fantastic fruit from this vineyard. Apart from the input the personnel make, which is surely a part of it, it’s the right variety in the right spot in the right soil, with the right aspect in the right climate. If you make up a list of all things that are desirable and start ticking them off, we get a lot of ticks.

Back in the late 1970s when the vineyard was planted there was not a lot of knowledge about what was going to grow best. We planted a lot of riesling because of the success Vasse Felix enjoyed in the early days. Although there wasn’t enough history to suggest exactly what going to happen, the people who planted the vineyard made some pretty good decisions. Twenty years on, if we ever start looking for new land for chardonnay, we have more knowledge to base our decisions on.

You haven’t made anything approaching a dud. How has the Chardonnay’s quality managed to be so consistent over the years?

Being so close to the ocean we receive a moderating influence on climate, so from year to year we get more consistent temperatures, although we get definite style variations from year to year. Some vintages have been quite light and delicate, others big and full. 1995 made a really voluptuous wine with huge flavours and texture, but not too big and aggressive. 1992 was a lighter year and the wine has turned out more elegant, like the 1990. 1996 is more tight and austere; the 1994 is more like that. But they’re all wines that will go on and live for quite a while.

We have chardonnay planted in different parts of the property and some blocks certainly do better than others. Block 20, for instance, is always the best every year, while in the last few years Block 22 has made Art Series material. Other blocks are more yes and no, and vary more from year to year.
Are you consciously making long-living wines?

I’m conscious of preserving fruit flavours all along; it’s our main aim. Whether at the end of the day this helps longevity, I don’t know. I think you have to have all those characters built into the fruit, which gets back to having the right grapes in the right spot, not to mention fantastic vineyard control.

If you don’t have a vineyard manager doing the right thing year in year out and producing high quality fruit, you cannot make wonderful wine. That’s his John Brocksopp’s contribution, and it’s as important, if not more important than my job. We’ve known this for years, but only in the last few years have people started saying it all begins in the vineyard.

Has the style refined over the years, and if so, how?

I think there have been changes as the vines are older now. Although we made fantastic wines in the first years we get less variation in our style today. Early on there was hardly any barrel fermentation, but now we use 100 and our fruit is easily big enough now to take all new oak each year. We’ve tried various things over the years, but today we’re actually doing very similarly to what we did in the early days. Sure we’ve a better understanding of our vineyard, how to prune and handle fruit. Like everyone else we looked at whole bunch pressing, but really we’ve steered away from it. We still do a little as a complexing thing. Our better wines have been crushed, given some skin contact and then barrel fermented in 100 new oak.

How much further can you take the wine?

We’ve developed a basic Leeuwin style, so each year we just look at it and fine-tune it. When you have a winning formula, why should you run around and be too radical? What we’re doing just seems to work well for us.
Have you considered introducing new clones to the vineyard?

We’ve some experimental blocks, but so far we’ve found nothing as good as the Gingin clone the original WA clone and the base of most of WA’s great chardonnay. The Art Series is basically 100 Gingin.

Of your other Art Series wines, of which are you most proud?

The Cabernet. We’re still working quite a bit to improve it and although we don’t have recognition for it as we do with chardonnay, we’re trying to get the Cabernet to that level. But even in Burgundy, if you make a good chardonnay, it doesn’t mean you make good pinot. If you have an almost perfect scenario for one variety, does it mean you cannot achieve the same level of greatness for other wines? You evolve these theories after a while, you see.

Where are your future winemaking challenges?

We’re not looking at other varieties with any great zeal, except shiraz. We had some in the early days but since it was planted in less than ideal conditions, we’re now revisiting it. But we’re not looking for an obviously Australian style, rather more Rhone-ish instead. We don’t want the big fat American oak thing, but would prefer nice fruit coming through with integrated French oak. We have two years in the pipeline, this year’s and last year’s. The wine is still evolving and we could have something out next year, although we haven’t made a final decision. Right now the young wines are changing so much from one month to another that you wonder. Since we have no history of shiraz to fall back on, we’ll have to wait and see. Please login to post comment