Interview – David Fyffe

Twenty-five years ago David and Christine Fyffe bought the property that was to become Yarra Burn, a small Yarra Valley vineyard and brand which is today owned by BRL Hardy. Yarra Burn’s fate typified that of so many small vineyards. The Fyffes went into the game without much winemaking knowledge or experience, but without any shortage of enthusiasm or energy. Neither did they have a bag of money to throw at the business, so they were severely affected by the extreme interest rates experienced in the last recession. Their site had great potential and the Yarra Burn wines collected a swag of awards in its first decade and for a while Yarra Burn was about as sexy a small wine brand as you could find. Today Christine Fyffe has found a new career as a Victorian state politician, while David continues to operate Yarra Burn for his new employers at BRL Hardy. He is also the public face of Yarra Burn, travelling constantly around Australia holding training sessions for beverage staff, conducting dinners for customers and retailers and generally spreading the good word about Yarra Burn as only he can.

How did you enter the wine industry?

I got trapped into buying a liquor store, Mayerling Cellars in Croydon, whose purchase I arranged for my brother who had retail experience in London. I’d put up the money, but he found another job back in London. Since I’d signed a five year lease, I tossed in my own job and began selling wine. I knew very little about the trade and opened the store with a rack of just twenty wines, selling things like Dalwood Hermitage, Moyston Claret and Yalumba Black Label Frontignac.

How did Yarra Burn begin?

We bought the land in 1975 and began planting in the winter of 1976. Our first varieties were pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon and gewurztraminer and in 1978 we picked a few grapes that the birds didn’t eat. That year we also made a shiraz from fruit bought from the Underhill Vineyard next to Yarra Yering. In 1979 we made some cabernet, a little pinot and some gewurztraminer. We grafted our half acre of gewurztraminer to merlot, which went into the cabernet and our first chardonnay was planted in 1980. Around that time I remember I bought a brand new Silvan spray unit but when it came to attach it to the little grey Fergie, it wouldn’t lift off the ground. So I had to go out and buy a new tractor!

You made the first ever Yarra Valley sparkling wine. When did that come about?

1983 was the year of Ash Wednesday and the heat from the fire dropped the leaves from the vines so we were left with bunches of under-ripe pinot noir. While I was wondering what I would do with 1,000 cases of rose, somebody suggested it might be good sparkling material. So the wine was made from settled juice by Dominique Landragin at Yellowglen. It cost me half the juice, but it was certainly a saviour.

Which wines you have made give you the most satisfaction?

The Pinot Noir 1984 was the wine that launched us. It won three trophies at the Victorian Wines Show at Seymour, including the Best Red and the Best Wine of the Show. Later that year it was the only pinot to get gold in Melbourne.

The 1986 Pinot Noir was also a successful show wine, for it won the National Trophy in Canberra. They came down later to check if we had enough of the wine for quantity requirements, and sure enough, we did. But I could have put them in touch with other people who had won pinot trophies with a quarter of the amount needed!

That year we also made what I believe was Australia’s first-released blend of sauvignon blanc and semillon. Even though it was a cheaper wine, it gave me a lot of satisfaction, since I’d managed to find a Yarra Valley semillon grower whose fruit could fill out some rather herby sauvignon blanc from another. It was a two to one blend and was all guesswork beforehand. But it worked out well and we had it on the market by the end of June.

The 1995 Cabernet also turned out as a very good wine, but that year we totally ran out of fermenting space. Nobody else could take it and nobody could sell us another tank. So we put plastic liners into sixty-eight small apple bins, took down the fence around the house and put them all around the verandah in case it rained. It took all day for two of us to hand plunge each of them twice, but the result was worth it.

Later that year BRL took over and two years later Steve Pannell made one of the best Yarra pinots of all, the 1997 Yarra Burn.

It’s likely that of the wines you made at Yarra Burn, most wine enthusiasts will remember the pinot noir. How do you describe the style you were after?

I’d studied winemaking at Wagga where Brian Croser had been a strong advocate of long, slow, cool ferments for pinot. His view was that you extracted too many hard tannins from hot ferments, so until 1983 we fermented at cool temperatures. The results were wines with good flavour which were very light in colour but were essentially lacking. So in 1984 we moved to a hotter ferment and continued that way, making a richer style. It was still dependent on vintage, of course, and sometimes we still made lighter wines. Finally we realised that most of the problems with getting body into pinot were solved in the vineyard, in our case by changing our trellising to vertical shoot positioning in the early 1990s, letting in the sunlight and consistently getting some decent colour into the wines.

What were the circumstances surrounding BRL Hardy’s purchase of the business?

We’d survived the days of the VEDC Victorian Economic Development Corporation thanks to the Commonwealth Bank and by 1994 we were back on track. But it was a great day when a year later Hardy’s walked in the door. I couldn’t shut it quick enough and lock it.
Today we’ve got money for new barrels. I couldn’t afford many new barrels each year but now we buy them by the container load. The difference is amazing and you can see the improvement most of all in the chardonnay.

What advice might you offer to weekend winemakers and those wanting to set up a small vineyard?

Buy a big boat and go fishing! accompanied by thunderous laughter It would be a lot cheaper in the long run.

The very small vineyards will do okay – the bloke with 2000-3000 cases who sells 90 at cellar door and the rest to restaurants. But perhaps there will be too many of them. One of the problems is that as grapes become more and more available to large companies from their own vineyards and from larger growers, they won’t be interested in buying tiny little parcels from the small blokes with five to ten acres. These guys will then have to make their own wine because they can’t sell their grapes, so we’ll find a whole new flood of new labels. The more cellar door sales there are will dilute everyone’s sales, so how will they market 1,000 cases? The other big issue is that you need just as much expertise to run a vineyard of ten acres as you do to run one of a thousand. Please login to post comment