Kooka Strikes Gold

There was a time not that long ago that I thought I’d met every type of grape grower there was. From the classic Francophile whose low vines with metre-wide spacings would break your back whenever you worked them, to the modern technocrat who never got any closer to a vine than the inside of a tractor cab, I thought I’d seen them all. From the bearded organic revolutionary or the biodynamic zealot, from the broad-acre industrialist to the windswept and alternative multi-clonal viticultural therapist, I know where they live. And then I bumped into Alec Epis.

Back in the 1960s Epis used to play some pretty handy football for Essendon, winning and losing a couple of premiership flags in the process. Hailing from Boulder, WA, outback somewhere near Kalgoorlie, he’s always valued his northern Italian heritage. Ever since the days he used to bottle the wine his father made, a meal would hardly pass by unaccompanied by wine although he says he had no great desire to get involved in its making.

Today, as he has done for years, Epis still makes his own cheese, butter, smallgoods and bread, grows his own vegetables in raised beds of corrugated iron, prepares his own olives, cultivates his own roses and cooks the traditional recipes handed down from his grandmother. He reckons the fact that he now produces wine is just an extension of what he’s always been doing, although it’s since become an even bigger part of his life than the Essendon Football Club, of which he is a director.

He’s no plutocrat, but Alec Epis has used his money wisely after his career in the VFL. In 1980 he bought a 26 acre property on the Calder Highway, just south of the often drizzly town of Woodend in what has become the Macedon Ranges wine region. Epis wasn’t looking to buy a vineyard site, but if he had been he couldn’t have done any better. In a word, he fluked it. Like many of the best cool climate sites around the world, his site is a perfect heat-trap. Sheltered from the south and west by established native forest, it slopes down a reasonable gradient directly northwards, capturing sunshine most daylight hours.

None of this mattered much to Epis back in 1980, although by the later years of the decade he’d decided to try his hand at viticulture. He’d long been a friend of Laurie Williams, who had owned and managed the Flynn and Williams vineyard near Kyneton responsible for a couple of head-turning cabernet sauvignons in the late 1980s, and Williams correctly told him that his site was too cool to plant cabernet sauvignon. Better country for chardonnay, he suggested.

Meantime, Epis had been monitoring the steady progress made by Bill Dhillon’s Bindi vineyard nearby at Gisborne. Bill’s son Michael, who is now responsible for Bindi’s winemaking, said to Epis that there was no reason why his site couldn’t grow red wine, but it could only be pinot noir. This seemed an acceptable compromise to Epis, who while hardly being an aficionado of pinot at the time, saw it as a green light to plant red grapes. After all, the guy is nearly Italian.

‘By 1989 I was seriously committed’, Epis recalls. ‘I had the time and the energy to develop a vineyard and I asked Laurie about all the complications. Once I decided to go, I went for it.’ He planted a trial chardonnay vineyard of 700 vines in 1991, spaced about a metre apart in rows about three metres wide. He’s since added regularly to these plantings, staying with chardonnay and pinot noir, most of which is clone MV6.

Today, at what was for a short time known as Chateau Kookaburra spend three minutes with Epis and you’ll need no explanation for that, there are now 2.5 acres of pinot noir and just under two of chardonnay. There’s irrigation and water aplenty, but nothing will persuade Epis to crop at anything above a miserly two tonnes per acre for chardonnay or a tonne and a half for pinot noir.

Which brings us to the time about five years ago that I found myself sitting next to Epis at a lunch at the MCG at which Essendon was shortly to trounce Melbourne. Within the space of about five minutes I had learned about Epis’ vineyard, the precise number of vines it was planted to and most of their names, how the vines were managed, how a legend by the name of Stuart Anderson was in charge his winemaking and – most importantly and most memorably – how there was no conceivable way that this vineyard wouldn’t receive every attention it ever needed because Epis was ‘totally committed’ towards it.

I haven’t witnessed before or since a professional football style of attitude to a cause superimposed over the comparatively sedate pastime of viticulture. In the years that have followed, during which time Epis has become a very good friend, he’s never once wavered from the ‘140 commitment’ he’s lavished upon the site.

Walking between the vines the other week, he saw a couple of unwanted buds shooting out from the vine cordons. ‘I’ve already been up and down the whole #@*! place twice cleaning it up’, he complained, taking a hefty but well-aimed swipe at the unwanted foliage. Trust me; this place is immaculate. The vines are pruned hard, leaving only eight buds set well aside from a clear crown. The buds are evenly placed to leave a consistent crop of well-exposed fruit perfectly adjacent to fruiting wires. Foliage is trained vertically, leaving a tall, narrow canopy able to make the most of Woodend’s occasionally erratic sunshine.

Since he’s not dependent on the wine business for his security, Epis took plenty of time before putting a wine into a bottle. Under the short-lived Chateau Kookaburra label, to which Stuart Anderson objected and actually succeeded in wiping, there was a rather botrytised chardonnay from the 1995 vintage that was only bottled into halves and never commercially released. According to its back label, it wasn’t exactly the best wine ever tasted by its grower, but it wasn’t the worst either. Similarly, a small number of halves of 1997 Chardonnay have been given away by Epis, basically to see how people reacted to it. By this time Anderson’s will had prevailed, and the label had been changed to ‘Epis’.

Supposedly in retirement, Stuart Anderson is still an active contract winemaker. He is still involved at Bindi, Mount Gisborne and Straw’s Lane, and has made all the Epis wines to date at the Mount Gisborne winery. Epis will pour a slab at the bottom of his Woodend property in January next year, atop of which he is utterly convinced a winery will be constructed in time for his 2002 vintage.

Anderson will continue to make the wine, using gentle and traditional techniques of extraction and minimal handling to let the vineyards’ assert their own qualities. A wine stylist, Anderson is loathe to impart too much winemaking interference into his approach, and holds back on the use of new oak to around thirty percent of any wine.

Irrespective of the personalities involved in their making, the wines from Domaine Epis deserve attention for their outright quality and for their distinctively Francophilic style, poles apart from mainstream Australian table wine. If there’s a better-kept secret in Australian wine right now, I want to know what it is. The Chardonnay, is fine, bright and minerally, with the sort of length and austerity you’d expect from some Chablis, with the purity of fruit you can find today in good Macon. The Pinot Noir is totally unexpected from this region, and while the wines made to date all look from the same family, it’s still far too early to really define a vineyard style. All reveal depth of aroma and flavour, not a hint of herbaceousness, remarkable colour and richness, and unmistakable varietal quality.

The 1997 Epis Chardonnay 18.2, drink 2002-2005 has evolved a little more quickly than I would have expected, even given its fractional degree of botrytis infection. Nevertheless, it remains a complex, citrusy wine whose aromas of honeysuckle, brioche and dried flowers, and long, nutty and savoury palate whose citrusy fruit finishes with steely acidity.

The 1998 wine 18.6, drink 2003-2006+ is beginning to emerge with some honeyed complexity as a stylish, fine and complex savoury style, with bright juicy cumquat fruit, well integrated creamy lees and bacony malolactic influences. While there’s a rustic, earthy note to the nose, its palate is clean and minerally, with a deep creamy core of flavour, before a lingering finish of talcum powder and wet slate. Frost stripped the vineyard of a decent 1999 vintage, and the small amount of chardonnay made never made it to the Epis label. A few months later Epis installed frost protective overhead irrigation.

From a classically long and warm season, the 2000 Chardonnay 18.8, drink 2005-2008+ ups the ante from the 1998 with more fleshiness, richness and brightness of fruit. It’s wild and floral, bursting with tropical and stone fruits, while retaining the length, freshness, chalkiness and racy acidity of the 1998 wine. Tasted from oak, the 2001 edition should develop in similar fashion. Steeped in layers of juicy peach/melon fruit, it’s exceptionally long and fine, finishing with the vineyard’s typical stamp of mineral acidity.

Domaine Epis Pinot Noir will change the way people view Macedon pinot noir – most of which simply reflects poor site selection, poor viticulture and the region’s unforgivingly cool climate. The first Epis Pinot Noir was from 1998 18.6, drink 2003-2006+. It began its life uncompromisingly deep, black and brooding, almost blocky in its strength and very primary in its delivery of dense cherry fruit. Now, beginning to show the benefit of some age, it’s become rather more expressive. Hints of earth and mineral, fragrant scents of rose petals, cloves and cinnamon, with spicy and lightly vegetal whole bunch influences have appeared, while the wine remains somewhat closed and youthful. It’s an honest guess as to how long this wine will develop for, but it’s sure not about to fade.

From its earliest days, the 2000 vintage 18.8, drink 2005-2008+ has appeared more classical. Deep, alluring spicy and floral scents precede a supple, fleshy palate whose layers of brandied dark cherry fruit and tight, fine-grained backbone. It’s long and bright and as clear as a chime, masks its hidden power well and culminates in the finest of lingering savoury finishes. It’s very early days, but the 2001 wine appears to me to share the attributes of its predecessors. It’s powerfully structured, opulent and heady, with a youthful minty note behind the musky spiciness of its aromas and long, chewy palate. Time will tell, but I expect this to become one of Victoria’s more important pinot noir vineyards.

In 1999, having leased it for one year prior, Alec Epis bought Laurie Williams’ four acres of mature cabernet vineyard, which he has since renamed ‘Epis and Williams’. He immediately went through it like a whirlwind, opening up the canopy, removing trees and planting half an acre of merlot. The first crop delivered to Anderson was the 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon 18.2, drink 2007-2011+, a fine, tight and supple wine whose excellent length of dark, penetrative berry fruit retains a light minty note. It’s finely balanced with cedary oak and powder-dry tannin.

More solid and structured, the 2000 vintage 18.8, drink 2008-2012+ offers iron-fisted cassis, dark cherry and red berry fruit sown into a velvet glove of firm, fine-grained tannins and cedary vanilla oak. Deeply scented with violets and cassis, it’s an exercise in the restrained power of pure, almost essence-like cabernet fruit, without a hint of over-ripeness. Possibly even better still and without a trace of regional mint, the 2001 vintage is densely packed with opulent, concentrated fruit, yet fineness and elegance are its hallmarks. With a small crop of merlot potentially available from 2002, it’s no exaggeration to suggest that this vineyard might actually fulfil the potential suggested by Virgin Hills and others in the north of the Macedon region. Please login to post comment