When you’re sourcing wines from all over the world, what are the most important things you look for?
Halfway through my wine journey, I was introduced to organically sourced wines with nothing added to them. When you’re working in the world of wine and from a front-of-house perspective, every single person values their ability to judge why a wine tastes the way that it does. But when I first started to taste these wines, from every single aspect that was sitting in the glass, I found them really difficult to describe. I thought, “I don’t know why it feels like that, smells like that, tastes like that. I’m transfixed by this. I have to know, like at a chemical level, why this thing tastes the way that it does.”
Professionally it’s a little bit daunting, when it’s your job to explain that to a customer, when you go, “I don’t actually have the language for this.” I realised then that it was a really significant part of my learning, because there was so much I didn’t yet know.
I became more and more fascinated. I went and did a couple of vintages with [Australian winemaker] Mac Forbes and had a go at making some wine, as well. I started to realise just how difficult it was to make a wine with nothing added to it at all, and I wondered what sort of magic these extraordinary people were using in a winery to make this stable and correct wine (because when I tried to do it, everything turned to vinegar straight away).
Over the course of time, I started to have an inkling that I wanted to be importing wines. And then my partner, Charlotte, and I did some vintaging in France – in Burgundy in 2011 and the Loire Valley in 2012. I was learning, slowly, bit by bit, what was necessary and what was possible from a farming perspective. But it wasn’t until 2013 when Charlotte and I did vintage with Claude Courtois in the Loire Valley that I realised there was actually really no magic in the winery at all; that the magic was happening in the vineyard.
So, for example, those were pretty iconic wines but made in a really uncelebrated, sleepy corner of the Loire Valley. And one of the most significant things I saw was that we were picking fruit in the morning and then we’d get into the winery let’s say two hours later. There was no machinery in this winery at all, just old basketry, and all the fruit that we’d picked two hours before was already sitting in the press, fermenting.
In all the wineries that I’d ever seen – in Spain, in the Loire Valley, everywhere – I’d never seen fruit just come into the winery and start fermenting straight away. The point of that is that when something starts fermenting straight away, it’s looking after itself, it’s like anti-oxidating. And I realised that this was the result of, like, three decades of organic farming on this site. I thought, “Oh wow, okay this winemaker’s a real extremist; a purist.” It was a real lightbulb moment. Charlotte and I weren’t even there for long, it was about ten days, but from then, my path just became very, very clear. I knew that when we started importing, we would only import wines that were organically farmed and had nothing added to them at all. And so that became a steadfast rule from the outset.
We returned to Australia and every night, after working at the Builder’s Arms, I’d come
home and just research (if I’m being honest, I still do that to this day). I discovered this whole underground network of people in France without websites or social media or even email addresses. A network of extremists, basically – from an environmental perspective, they were absolutely uncompromising, and uncompromising in the winery as well. What they were bottling had to be organic and had to contain nothing but fruit.
Was it specifically French winemakers that were leading this movement?
No, there have always been pockets of this everywhere, but it’s more well-known in France. If you look at where we’re at today in the world of natural wine, it has essentially become mainstream, which is great. That was kickstarted in France, but widely supported by interesting producers in Italy and, of course, Georgia. If you look at how people have been making wine in Georgia, this is not a new thing – to get some grapes and ferment them and bottle them with no additions. And there are pockets of rural Spain where people have just never used chemicals, have never thought to add anything to the wine.
It’s the traditional way of doing things.
Absolutely. Most of the wines we’re exposed to when we’re growing up – like the first wines that we taste – the cultural driver for making those wines is money. If you’re buying wine from the supermarket when you’re at university and the wine costs $8.50, that project is a money-making project. I didn’t realise until going to France that, at a cultural level, what people were valuing by getting out of bed and going to the vineyard was totally different. There’s no financial planning – the number one driver is quality. And it’s hard to make money like that.
Because it can only be done on a small scale?
CB: Yeah, exactly. And I don’t know many people who, if that’s their mentality, also have the mentality to say, “I need to charge”. Whether they’re a jewellery maker or a saddler or a winemaker, most of those people say, “I just want to do the best job I possibly can.” Often, they don’t know how to charge enough for their work. Some people can and they say, “Cool, I made this ring and it took me six months to make it and I’m going to charge you $60,000 for it.”
But it’s hard in a market when they’re competing with producers on a mass scale who are just churning it out.
Exactly and so, broadly speaking, those people who are proper artisans in France and just want to make an amazing product that’s uncompromising, they don’t make cheap products, but they also don’t make them very expensive.
Back to your question…when we’re sourcing wines, for us to approach a new person, typically what we do is use these websites we’ve discovered and our existing network we’ve got and a new name might pop up that we think aligns with the people we work with – people that make all their wines with zero additions and farm organically and, by and large, only bottle wines they’ve farmed themselves (I’m not dogmatic on that as a rule but most of the people we work with farm their own fruit).
I haven’t been to Europe since 2019 (initially because of Covid but also because our family’s growing now) but, generally speaking, we go and meet the producer on the next trip to Europe and then see if we basically get along, and if we like the wines, and it starts like that. And if everything aligns and we see it being a good relationship, we’re passionate about the wines and passionate about the stories, and the vineyard’s amazing, and economically it feels viable, we give them an order and get started like that.
