In the latest of our series of extended interviews with leading wine growers marking 20 years of The World of Fine Wine, Brian Croser of Tapanappa in South Australia reflects on viticulture, climate, and the rise of Australian terroir winemaking.
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The role of the vineyard in Australian fine wine
Brian Croser: Australia went through a huge expansion through the 1990s to 2005. A lot of that expansion occurred in the inland, highly irrigated areas, with fruit that was destined for the grocery stores as branded commodity wine—your Jacob’s Creek and the like. A lot of overplanting happened then, and we’re now bearing the consequences of that. Like California, like Italy, like Bordeaux, like Germany, I understand, we’re going to have to get rid of quite a lot of those branded commodity vines—but that’s still not what we’re talking about.
For the whole of the past 20 years, that overrun of branded commodity wine has colored—jaundiced, if you like—the fine-wine industry in Australia. We do have a vibrant, buoyant or semi-buoyant, fine-wine industry here that’s been growing for the past decade at about 4% (combined export and domestic). If you take out the American bubble of 2000 to 2008 and the Chinese bubble of 2011 to 2021, then underlying growth of premium wine in Australia is strong.
So, what’s happened in the premium wine sector? Well, we’ve made a major, major change in terms of recognizing the role of the vineyard in fine wine. We’ve gone from having the fruit-salad vineyards of the 1990s, where everything grew alongside everything else—Gewürztraminer alongside Merlot, alongside Pinot. And we’ve recognized the regional specialities—that certain grape varieties are suited to certain regions: Riesling and Semillon in Clare… Cabernet in Margaret River and Coonawarra… Chardonnay in the Adelaide Hills, Yarra Valley, Mornington… Pinot in the same places, and in Tasmania, of course. So, that recognition has been dramatic over the past two decades. At the same time, there’s been a recognition of terroir, of the influence of place on wine quality, wine uniqueness, wine style.
Our good friend [WFW contributing editor] Andrew Jefford has been very important in that. He came out in 2008, when the debate was: “Is terroir really a construction of the French, and an affectation, or is it a real thing?” The Australian fine-wine industry would now accept that terroir is a real thing, and that fine wine is a reflection of the place where it’s grown. And then refining that one step further—not all sites within a region are created equal. There are some distinguished sub-regions and distinguished sites that grow the regional grape varieties better than other vineyards sites. The idea of the distinguished site has been accepted, and everybody, I think, in the fine-wine industry, is now working to make sure that the site is right, then refining what they’re doing on that site to get the best possible result out of it.
Viticulture as manicure
Brian Croser: At the beginning of these 20 years, we were a fairly agricultural industry. A lot of the technology was developed for vineyards in the inland areas, the highly irrigated, high-productivity vineyards, and applied in other regions. Now there is much more focus on how the vineyard is set up: closer spacing, the orientation of the rows, the height of canopy, and, of course, the clonal material used, the rootstock material used. There is just much more fastidious viticulture across the whole of the fine-wine sector in Australia.
We are really emulating what’s been happening on the west coast of America, to a lesser extent in New Zealand, and certainly in the Old World—almost down to manicuring each vine according to its special requirements. When I planted Foggy Hill [in 2003], I’d already been in a war of words with the Coonawarra region—in particular, on broad spacing, big vines, lots of fertilization, lots of irrigation, big equipment, mechanical pruning, mechanical picking… as all of that was causing mediocre results. At our vineyards in Coonawarra [at Petaluma], we’d set up much closer spacing, as we did with our vineyards in the Piccadilly Valley in the Adelaide Hills. And having had experience with those closer spaced vineyards in Oregon, I was very pleased with the success. So, I decided that at Foggy Hill, that was the way we needed to go. I had been looking at that site for a couple of decades and not telling anybody (including my wife, because that meant we were going to spend some money on more vineyards). And then when the takeover of Petaluma occurred in 2001, I had the opportunity to buy the farm with the site.
In my mind, I pictured we were going to make La Tâche 5 miles (8km) from the great Southern Ocean, because it had exactly the right sort of day-night temperature differential, the right heat summation, the right humidity. And of course, we didn’t make La Tâche. But we have made a very special Pinot out of that site by implementing the vineyard in the right way. Raymond Bernard from Dijon actually visited the site in 2004, and walked down the vineyard and said, “This is a good home for my babies.” And so we have those clones, his Pinot clones, on rootstock, close-spaced and very close to the ground—and that sort of viticulture was pretty much unknown in Australia in 2003. Now, in 2024, there are vineyards in almost all the quality areas that would reflect those same priorities.
Minor for the lifetime of a vineyard; a catastrophe for the globe
Brian Croser: From the 1980s on, I started thinking about and talking about climate change, and how we had moved at least one degree from industrial times by the time I planted Foggy Hill. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not so important for our vineyard—that’s going to be in the ground for 40 years. The climate, the movement of the temperature, is relatively minor, even though it’s a major catastrophe for the globe.
And it’s relatively minor, in terms of the vineyard, compared to the climate cycles that we go through. We have three climate drivers down here in Australia. We have the ENSO [El Niño Southern Oscillation], out of the Pacific. We have the Indian Ocean dipole out of the Indian Ocean, up near Broome. And we have what’s called SAM, the Southern Annular Modulation, which crosses the Great Southern Ocean between us and the Antarctic—that’s the thing that influences our weather most, and my mind was very firmly on SAM as an influencer of this vineyard site. And all in a positive sense, because SAM brings cool air from the Antarctic up onto the coast.
So, I wasn’t thinking about climate change as having an effect in my lifetime on that vineyard. I was thinking about climate change having an effect in my children’s and my grandchildren’s lifetimes. I’m very much more focused on vintage variation. There are 212 days in the growing season—from October 1, to April 30—and a shift of 1°C [1.8°F] in the weather of that growing season produces a shift of 212°C [382°F] in the heat summation. So, for example, in the Piccadilly Valley, if it’s 1,175 degree days centigrade, if it goes up by one degree centigrade for every day of those 212 days, then we’re at 1,580 degree days centigrade—and we had that in 2016 and 2018. But if it goes down by one degree, then we go down to 900—which we had in 2011. And then there are a lot of vintages that fit in between those two extremes. But even in the coldest and the hottest years, the vineyards have still stayed true to their terroir—they produced wines that are recognizably Tiers Chardonnay, recognizably Foggy Hill Pinot, recognizably Whale Bone Cabernet/Merlot. So, I’m somewhat consoled in the timeframe that I’m involved. I don’t think I can say that in my lifetime I’ve seen a dramatic change because of climate change—in wine style or wine quality or wine composition. But I have seen dramatic change with the weather cycles.
No substitute for living in the vineyard
Brian Croser: Throughout my winemaking viticultural life, from the early ’70s onward, the vineyard has been my focus, and I’ve developed all sorts of methodologies for being able to sample vineyards properly. But there is no substitute for living in a vineyard, or for the length of time that you live in your vineyard—the accumulation of experience, the empirical observation. You can tell when vines are going to be thirsty. You can tell when they’ve got too much water. You can tell when they’re looking tired from lack of nutrients. You can become very, very attuned to what you’re observing, and to what you’re seeing on the ground, too… cracks in the ground, grass drying off.
My viticulture has changed to become more minimalist. We definitely don’t use Roundup [herbicide] anymore. We do use a knockdown herbicide. We don’t use anything other than copper and sulfur in the vineyard. But I haven’t gone organic, and I certainly haven’t gone biodynamic.
I think there is a division in our industry—which is fine, it’s a lovely, intellectual division—between the spiritual and the scientific. We’re definitely on the scientific side, but not as rigorously on the scientific side as my good friends, the Cazes family of Lynch-Bages, where they collect mountains of data about every little subsection of their vineyard. I don’t feel the necessity to do that, because my vineyards are smaller and I’m intimately in them every day of the growing season, so data doesn’t drive what we do. It’s very much based on observation and experience of what’s happened in the past, and trying to extrapolate that to the present and future. But there are many examples of recognition technology and artificial intelligence, and data can provide answers for much bigger areas of vines, and much more complex situations, than ours. Penfolds would be a great example of that—they are using all that sort of stuff to the nth degree.
The spiritual and the orthodox
Brian Croser: There is a bit of a revolution going on in fine wine around the world. I think part of it is that almost nobody can afford the best of the “orthodox” products—the La Tâches and the Latours. So, there is a movement to look for alternatives, for alternative grape varieties and alternative ways of growing and dealing with them.
Biodynamics is applied to the orthodox as well, of course—it’s big in Burgundy and it’s big in Bordeaux. It’s a spiritual thing, more ideological than scientific. But because of the restrictions that it imposes on the management of the vineyard, you end up with a product that is high-quality—maybe higher in quality than from conventionally run vineyards.
I believe it can be matched by the best scientific approach on the other side of the coin. But biodynamic connects with consumers, as does organic—the sort of more spiritual, more ideological approach to things. My methods are very similar, but we would never make a claim that they’re the same order. And there are some very bad outcomes with biodynamics and organic in bad seasons. I remember the winemaker at Palmer telling me that in 2018 (I think it was) they lost half their crop to mildew because of the application of biodynamics. There is a rejection of science that becomes evil; that is absolutely not true. But I don’t think biodynamics necessarily crosses that line. I think it’s much more benign than that. I think it can live pretty comfortably with science.
