Mornington Peninsula goes minimalist
Why a hands-off approach is getting the thumbs up.
"Effortless" is a word I find myself using more and more when describing beautiful wines. On the contrary, I find myself using its opposite "a try-hard wine" less often, which is a good thing.
Effortless means the winemaker hasn't asserted him or herself too much, but has stood back and allowed the grapes to do the talking. It stands to reason that the less the winemaker interferes, the more the wine will express its sense of place, its ''terroir'' in French parlance. And that is what every wine's back-label is promising us these days - even when they don't always deliver it.
An example of a try-hard wine might be a classic South Australian red from the 1980s: dark, blackish colour, reeking of new-oak barrels, tasting thick and tannic and overly concentrated.
The winemaker probably harvested the grapes overripe, added acid and tannin, aged the wine for too long in small barrels, of which too many were new. They may even have used one of several methods to concentrate the juice before fermentation, which alters the balance of its natural components. These wines seldom taste effortless, or natural.
Thankfully, the age of minimal intervention has dawned. Today's Australian wines generally taste better because they are less manipulated.
Mike Aylward of Mornington Peninsula winery Ocean Eight is a young man who gets this. Ably assisted by his consultant, former sommelier Grant Van Every, Aylward is making lovely, effortless wines at his family vineyard and winery at Shoreham. His parents, Chris and Gail, established Kooyong in the early 1990s before selling it to the current owner in 2003. They kept a small pinot gris vineyard as their son, Mike, then 25, had been working at Kooyong while completing a science degree and wanted to make wine. After researching the peninsula, they bought an established vineyard at Tuerong, already planted to pinot noir and chardonnay, and built a winery. The Aylwards and Van Every travelled the globe researching wine styles, winemaking and viticulture. Chris, Mike and Grant are all mad-keen golfers, and the new wine venture was named Ocean Eight after the most challenging hole on the local golf course, the National.
Launched in 2004, the first Ocean Eight wine was a pinot gris, which signalled that a bright new player had arrived on the course. Mike Aylward teed off with the '04 pinot gris; the '06 chardonnay and '07 pinot noir followed it down the fairway.
The Ocean Eight chardonnays were among the first of the new-wave restrained, low-alcohol style of chardonnay that came out of southern Victoria early in the new century. Where Aussie chardonnays had been 14 or even 14.5 per cent alcohol, Ocean Eight was 12 to 12.5. The latest vintage, 2012, holds that course, with 12.2 per cent. Aylward named it Verve, because it had verve. It was fruit-driven and bursting with high natural acidity. Indeed, some found the acidity a bit too high. So, rather than pick the grapes much later and risk straying into the full-bodied, broader style most Australians were making, Ocean Eight simply began allowing a percentage of the wine to undergo a malolactic fermentation, which is a natural bacterial reaction resulting in lower acidity. The 2012 Verve chardonnay ($40) is not as racy as earlier vintages, a little softer and rounder, without sacrificing the refined, low-alcohol, lightly oaked house style. Van Every jokes that hard-acid chablis styles are loved by sommeliers but not by the public.
Aylward points out the wine is made without any new oak, always undergoes ''wild'' ferment - with naturally occurring, not inoculated, yeasts - and is never acidified. Some puncheons are used instead of barriques, because puncheons (of 465 litres capacity) give less oak flavour and aroma than smaller barriques (225 litres). The 2012 Verve has a touch of smoky matchstick complexity on the bouquet and a fine balance of delicacy and richness in the mouth. Similar techniques are used with pinot gris, and the 2013 ($29) has an attractive silky mouth-feel and a more oily texture, the fermentation in barrel lending a nuttiness to the spicy fruit bouquet.
A similar hands-off philosophy is applied to Ocean Eight pinot noir. Here, in the interests of letting the grapes express themselves, Aylward eschews the stalk inclusion that some on the peninsula practise, as he believes stalks take away from the perfume and raise the wine's pH, which results in loss of colour vibrancy. Again, it's aged mostly in older barrels, with just a few new ones each year. "We try to retain as much of the perfume as we can," says Aylward, "so we ferment fairly cool and have a cold pre-fermentation maceration".
In pinot, he concedes that a little acid addition is usually needed, and also that with the limited-production Aylward pinot noir, some juice is drained off to concentrate it - although the aim is not to make a bigger bodied wine but to intensify the perfume.
And it works. Both current pinot noirs, the 2012 Ocean Eight ($40) and 2010 Aylward ($56) are superbly fragrant, delicate, fine wines with the refreshing properties common to low-alcohol red wines. They contain 13.2 and 13 per cent alcohol respectively. They're so effortless, it's almost a case of (apologies: cliche alert) the wine making itself.
