Brad Hickey's Wine Odyssey

New Day Rising for 2015

I've come back to the blog-o-sphere after a hiatus. I'd like to rethink this platform as a place to write out ideas, works in progress and to keep notes on the goings on here at BH HQ and the greater world of wine at large.  As we approach vintage 2015, my fifth at Brash Higgins, I realize that I'm not keeping a good enough journal on this microcosm of wine and food creativity revolving around me. I am clearly at the apex of my career and life. 

Warming Winter Bones

It's always sweet relief when I get the nero d'Avola we make at Brash Higgins out of the clay pots and into a settling tank. Until this happens, everything is a little tense around HQ.  This condition was heightened even more in 2013, since we had the wine stored in our carport. Nobody likes the guy with the clay pots in a busy winery.
But it was all good, the wine was taken off skins a couple weeks ago and is settling nicely now.  We'll let gravity do its thing for a couple months or so then bottle her up.   2013 looks to be a very strong year all around.  The growing season saw a lot of vineyards ripen earlier than expected and all at once, which caused a bit of pressure.  Our vineyard "Omensetter" hung in there and produced another healthy crop of shiraz, cab and nero.  Look forward to the results next year. 

We've also been having some fun this winter hosting a number of Brash dinners around the country and getting to know our fans on a more intimate level.  It all kicked off with a brilliant "PIG" dinner in Brisbane with the help of my friend Peter Marchant of Le Petit Cochon and the delicious food from Dalton Hospitality at the unusual Ballymore rugby grounds location.  It was the first unveiling of the 2008 "Omensetter", our first proprietary red, a blend of our vineyard's Shiraz and Cabernet. Aged 3 years in new French hogsheads and aged two years in bottle, it's quite the wine.  The wine and food went down well, an amazing night. Pretty cool posters, too.

That event gave us the confidence to do another event.  Next up was a "Xmas in July" at one of our local faves, Fino in Willunga.  We packed the room, and with the help of Nicole and Shaz, everything looked great; the food, wine and presents flowed.  Showed off a fortified project I'm working on with my mate, Steven Matthews, as well.  We have two 40 year old barrels that one time housed Macallan scotch for 25 years and are full of the loveliest little Tawny now.  It was a huge hit, and motivated me and Steven to find a couple of other older, character rich barrels to add to our Solera system.  It felt great to pull off a Xmas meal like that and get to hang out with folks that dig what we are doing.  Also nice to put bums on seats in a place where you love to eat.Brash used that same Tawny at "Game of Rhones" in Melbourne a few days later.  The Game was a parody of the Game of Thrones TV series, but focused seriously on Rhone style wines from the 40 selected producers present on the day.  A huge crowd of trade and punters got to taste some amazing juice.  Miraculously, the Brash GR/M and Omensetter finished tied for 4th in the top 5 out of 100's of wines, read about it here.  An amazing feat really.  People also really dug the Tawny, too.  We need to bottle some of that soon. 

 

 

Untangling Field Blends

We made our first white wine this year at Brash Higgins, which is very exciting news, because it's not as easy as it sounds. 2012 was a good year for whites in McLaren Vale, and many passes thru white varietal vineyards had me thinking this could be the year. For a long time I've been a fan of the traditional white field blends of Friuli in Italy and Alsatian winemaker Jean Michel Deiss; wines that are made from multiple varieties interplanted in one vineyard, red or white. It's an old fashioned way of making wines, one frought with risk and headaches, and not done much anymore. The grapes are picked on the same day and co-fermented together to create something wholly unusual and complex and a good representation of how the site may taste as a whole, rather than just as a single varietal. This business of co-fermenting different grapes together is absolutely fascinating to me. And the odds of a vineyard having a few different varieties on it all looking good at the same time is also a long shot, particularly in solar driven McLaren Vale. Most modern blended wines are vinified separately and blended only at bottling time, affording the wine maker the opportunity to taste the finished wines and mix them judiciously. Deiss argues that the correct grapes need to be used to showcase the way a site can be best expressed. Riesling, of course, is one of his main stays being from Alsace. The transparency of the varietal gives a clear impression of where it's from.One grape he doesn't mention, however, is semillon. Semillon, a complex white grape, is often blended with sauvignon blanc in blends around Bordeaux and the world, grown on its own in the Hunter and Barossa and elsewhere, yet is almost never paired with riesling. Why not?

So this year with the help of Peter Bolte, my viticulturist, I found myself walking the rows of many vineyards. We came to one high altitude site I had been to previously which made nice semillon in the Kangarilla foothills on Saddlebags Road. I never knew it had riesling planted on it as well until this year. Both varieties, growing like Siamese twins, were deliciously fresh, and, more importantly, coming on to ripeness at almost the same time. If this game isn't about what's in the vineyard, then I'll just hang up the secateurs and go back to my day job at the car wash. Not knowing for sure what this "new" co-fermented wine will taste like is part of the adrenalin rush. Co-fermentation might seem old-fashioned and rigid, but some contemporary winemakers believe that combining different grapes during fermentation can produce wines that are better integrated, more seamless and perhaps more aromatic. The earlier you are in the process when marrying things together, the better they integrate. Mixing the grapes at crush means the fermenting grapes have different levels of acid, tannin and sugar, and that in turn changes the rates and types of chemical reactions that take place during fermentation. When you combine grapes, you change the pH, and that pushes the tannin reactions. In the end you get a very different wine than you would by blending the separate varieties later. When you blend varieties separately you get wines that you can control precisely, but when you co-ferment you get some added perfume characters that are sort of a melange of those grapes together that you don't get in wines that are blended later. If the mix of grapes is right, co-fermented wines can be brilliant, and as a field blend, we may have something even more extraordinary, something as individual and unique as a person. A one of a kind marriage of fruit and place DNA that can never be replicated. That's a lot of info to disentangle, but at the end of the day field blends make pretty cool little wines to swirl around in your glass. Hope mine makes one some day, too.

Vale Cru on the Road to Adelaide; Sydney

McLaren Vale's rollicking collective of indie wine labels, Vale Cru, is on the road this June. On June 8 from 430pm a small contingency of the "Cru", including Brash Higgins, will be showcasing their wines and speaking at the National Wine Centre in Adelaide. Following this event the mob, w/ Brash along for the ride, as well, will be in Sydney, Wednesday, June 20 at the East Village Hotel for a blowout of unusual proportions; 3pm-5 trade, 5pm onward for all thirsty consumers. BH

Making of the Brash Higgins "Amphora Project" NDV

In 2009 Brash Higgins obtained some of the first cuttings of the Sicilian red wine grape, Nero d’Avola, available in Australia. Nero is drought and heat tolerant, ripens late and thrives in its native Mediterranean climate, so it seemed like a good fit for coastal McLaren Vale and our ever mounting heat and water issues.  We dedicated a research block on our Omensetter Vineyard to the variety and grafted it to shiraz rootstock in October 2009.  It took off like gangbusters. We were heading in the right direction, but how would we vinify it? It would take 2 years before the vines were old enough to harvest.

 

A little background: for a few years now I've been drinking Italian wines from Sicily and Friuli fermented and aged in clay amphora vessels, and I've found them diabolical, challenging, sometimes ethereal/scary, yet always thought-provoking wines.  Frank Cornelissen and COS winery in Sicily, in particular, ferment  and age their  wines using this method of burying the amphora up to the rim in a cool cellar, a method which they in turn learnt from Josko Gravner in Northern Italy and he from the pre Romans.  It was then that my curiosity got the best of me: how can I get my hands on these amphora?  If we handle this new grape variety to Australia, nero d’Avola, in a unique and gentle way, eschewing oak and steel, then, perhaps, we can get something totally new and distinct.

   Amphora seemed like a good way to not only introduce Nero d’Avola, a high acid and transparent varietal, but to make a statement, as well.  We were just as ready as the Italians to step deep into the past to make a leap forward.

 

2011 was cool and wet, most rain since 1973, and not ideal for growing any grapes, let alone Mediterranean sun-loving types. But diligent work in the vines early, an excellent site open to mildew defeating breezes and a miraculous dry, warm week in late April helped get our first nero harvest across the line. It was a nail biter, riding up and down the rows on a ATV at dawn and dusk chasing the starlings off the latest ripening patch in the district, an esky full of Pale rattling behind me. The baume crossed 13.5.

 

We got the fruit there, healthy and ripe, and now all we needed was our amphora. I was distrustful of importing clay pots from abroad, especially from far way places like Georgia or Tuscany.  Would they even send them or just keep my money; what if they were poorly made?  And foreign amphora is even more expensive than new French oak, which had my accountant in a tizzy.  So I started asking local potters if they were up to it, and they all said, “No! too hard to do, too big.” Until one of them told me to contact a family pottery in Adelaide.   I had a meeting with the potter, John Bennett, and he was game to give it a shot. Even though his biggest pot to date was only  a 100L Tandoori oven, Bennett’s Magill Pottery had the largest kilns in Adelaide and the most experience, so I trusted him. We wanted to use the same red clay from our vineyard for the pots, making a ‘terroir incubator” of sorts, and were happy that the red clay John used was from our local soils, nearly identical to our vineyard.

 

The last issue was how to line the insides of the pots, as terracotta is porous, and we weren’t ready to submerge the pots in the earth just yet. We decided on McLaren Vale bees-wax as a logical seal, and decided to apply it just after the warm pots came out of the kiln to get deep penetration into the clay. Although dried bees-wax is inert and flavourless, the pottery smelled like the inside of Winnie the Pooh’s locker.  It kept the wine from evaporating, as well as keeping oxygen out post ferment. Plus, it makes the pots more hygienic for the long haul, easier to keep clean, and keeping microbial activity at a minimum.

 

Our research block of nero d'Avola fruit was handpicked May 1, 2011, a trim one and a half tons, then  destemmed and gently crushed into each of the five amphora.  A wild ferment ensued, as we left the pots open, hand plunging the skins once or twice a day. After 14 or so days the ferments went dry, the skins sank and we sealed up the amphora, skins and all, with custom made 1/4 inch thick stainless lids for 7 months.  We basket pressed the fruit in late November, let it settle naturally, and bottled 112 cases unfined and unfiltered before Xmas 2011.

 

  "More of a ballerina than a boxer, the 2011 Brash Higgins NDV is a glowing, translucent ruby in colour. On the nose waves of fresh cut lavender, ginger bread, wet stone, nutmeg and orange zest aromas leap out of the glass.  Soft and delicate on the palate with an earthy warmth, there is a deep core of bright, sweet cherry fruit that belies the wine’s initial lightness.  Good acidity and clarity with firm fruit tannins from extended lees and skin contact, the finish lingers long after the first sip. A gentle-natured newcomer with great purity and potential, the wine is best decanted and served with a light chill. 112 cases. BH"

 

Don't drink that! and the loss of a great white Burgundy.

 

I routinely want to open "special bottles". Lets taste it, see what is happening. If it's great, get more, if not, then best to know now.  This 2005 Meursault-Perrieres from Michelot, for example, is delicious, do not hesitate to buy a position. Buy all you can find, if you can find it. BH 

Reflections on 2011 and Ted Nugent

2011 has been a massive year for me. However, in many ways, each one of the years that preceeded it has led me to where I am right now, sitting at a desk in a hot office in McLaren Vale, South Australia enjoying one too many zooper dooper frozen ice treats. Brash Higgins Wine Co.
finally came into being this year after what seems like years of planning.  It's been a lifetime, actually. I've just bottled and labelled 2 new wines, which now brings us to 4 wines: a Grenache/Mataro co-ferment and my nero d'Avola fermented and aged in amphora.  Both wines look nice and I couldn't be happier with them. More on this in a bit, the Nuge is barely strapped in. 

A Nero d'Avola whirlwind in Sicily

I went to Sicily this Summer to explore the origins of the grape nero d'avola and how to best cultivate it.  As mentioned before, this red wine grape was harvested in May last year on our McLaren Vale vineyard and is poised to make a smart little wine. We went over in August, with my viticulturist and partner and surprise! it was really, really hot. Our warm and dry summer climate in South Australia is almost identical to breezy SE Sicily, which sits next to North Africa in the Mediterranean.  Also, another bonus, the nero at Azienda Agricola Cos Winery, our hosts in Sicily, thrives in both sandy and clay soils, just like those of our Omensetter Vineyard at Brash Higgins HQ in McLaren Vale. 

All good news for a neophyte nero grower.  Cos is also well known for fermenting its nero in clay amphora, an idea taken from ancient times, and recently rediscovered in Northern Italy thru the wines of Gravner.  It was great to see their operation and to ask questions, especially since Brash Higgins' nero has also spent 6 months on its skins in 200L clay pots. The difference is that our pots were made locally and from similar soil as our vineyards; Cos pots are Spanish and buried in a mixture of sand and gravel.  The pots themselves are not lined, Spanish clay is apparently less porous than some others, so they keep the soil around the pots wet to minimize evaporation.

The grounds at Cos are beautiful and it is a haven amidst a poor part of Sicily.  There is a full time chef named Pino cranking out delicious Sicilian food, and a great outdoor area by the pool, surrounded by vines. This is a welcome respite from the drying scirocco winds. After a day out in the vines, it was a godsend.

The people of Sicily are a varied lot, since the place has been ransacked and occupied from many different nations over time.  The ongoing battle of the people reclaiming the country from the Mafia was a recurring theme, as well.  More in a bit. BH

Vintage 2011 and Getting the Nero Over the Line

The storm clouds they gathered and as a grape grower, it was white knuckle time again for Brash Higgins Wine Co. So much of the harvest is out of the grower's control; the weather, disease, insects and birds clearly have a mind of their own. On the heels of a healthy, dry 2010 harvest, disease pressure was the particular flavour of the vintage this time around, particularly in the form of downy mildew and then, later, botrytis (not the nice kind like in Sauternes). In some parts of South Australia, like the Riverland, Barossa, Adelaide Hills and the Vale, we've had a cool, and unusually wet vintage.  Fortunately, our Omensetter Vineyard in McLaren Vale is a great site; the benefactor of reliable ocean breezes and a sun loving eastern sloping aspect which helps keep things dry and clean in the vineyard, whereas lower lying and inland vineyards can sometimes suffer when humidity is heavy.  The Shiraz and Cabernet fruit we grow was dark and healthy this year, looking like glistening caviar in the bins, sugar levels were where they needed to be, and most importantly, they both tasted varietal and delicious.  Always a great relief to see the fruit off the vines looking and tasting so good.  As we assess the 2011 vintage now that it's over, those that were on their spray programs early and had good ventilation did well.  For Cabernet, it was in particular a stunning year district wide.

One other factor which reared its head this year was the plight of the grower that was positioned next to an untended or abandoned vineyard.  After the previous 3 drought vintages ran roughshod over some growers, those without resources or energy to spray their vineyards with sulphur the way they might normally like to created a dangerous scene for their neighbours.  If your land abutted an abandoned vineyard, chances of disease pressure in your plot increased merely by proximity. Whether or not the government steps in in the future to remedy this situation by removing abandoned sites or spraying them remains to be seen.  It's a tricky one.

 Our patch of Nero d'Avola planting is at 2.5 acres now, as I discussed in my last entry, and was grafted in 2 waves on to a block of our shiraz rootstock in 2009 and 2010. The first wave, the 2009 graft, was ready to produce fruit this year and was looking very good, yet still not getting the necessary steady heat to get itself over the ripeness line. There was also a bit of bird damage appearing on an outside row, so now we also had to consider netting the block.  Obviously, once you net it is very difficult to get back in to the vines, so we opted to wait it out and form a bird patrol in hopes we would get a warm Indian summer for a week to get the Nero ripe. 

  Myself, Bobo, and Dave B. took turns chasing birds off the vines, especially during sunrise and sunset.  Until now I've never paid that much attention to birds, but every species I spotted came under severe scrutiny; from starlings to sparrows, no bird was my friend.  Perched on my ATV with an esky of Coopers Pale Ale at hand, sans shotgun, pirate flag raised, I was not going to let my find feathered friends make a meal and get in the way of a glorious week of predicted dry, warm weather; I had come too far.  Roaring up and down rows with the determination of Mark Spitz, it must have been quite a sight for anybody happening to drive by the block that week.  
In the end we got it over the line, Baume levels (amount of sugar in a grape) bumped up from 12.5 to 13.5 during that week, and all signs of greenness transformed into lovely bright berry flavours with a slight savouriness: perfectly Nerolike.  We  got the picking crew together for an early Friday hand pick, all 7 of us, and managed to carefully snip 2 tons of healthy, ripe Nero d'Avola fruit.  The whole pick took a mere 2 hours. Next stop for the fruit was the five handmade local 200L amphora/terracotta pots it would call home for the next year.

 Seems more I work this site, it has become clear that great terroir is a combination of a good location and the people that work it.  You can have a special piece of land, for sure, but if the grower is slack, than you'll never get anything great from it.  The role of man in the concept of terroir has been forgotten, and now in particular it has never seemed more important to me. Without a good team, we'd never have gotten the excellent fruit we ended up with in 2011, no matter how great the Omensetter site is.  As James Agee famously lifted from the book of Ecclesiasticus, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us".  Sounds a bit much perhaps, but right now it makes perfect sense.

The Nero d'Avola Chronicles

We've been preparing our vineyard to harvest our very first crop of the red wine grape Nero d'Avola.  It's a new variety to Australia and I'm going to put it under a new label I've been working on, which shall remain a secret for a little while longer. As a relative newcomer to this district, I'm proud to be hopefully making a variety that may one day become vital to this region.  Indigenous to Sicily, where it is well suited for a hot, dry climate like our own in McLaren Vale, we grafted the Nero vines over to a shiraz block in 2009.  I was close to getting cuttings in 2008, but the GFC led Macquarie Bank to take over the nursery we were dealing with and, strangely enough, the bank took all the cuttings for itself.  Nero is capable of producing tremendously complex wine in a number of different styles.  Similar to shiraz, but with dusty tannins and more savoury elements, the grape ripens much later which could lead to some interesting flavours.  Right now, our half acre block will probably be ready in May, a full 2 months after we harvest our shiraz.  It is also a prolific producer.  The current yield forecast is for 3 tons of fruit, which makes sense when you see just how big and open the bunches are, easily twice as long as the length of my hand.  One of the ways to affect the taste of the juice after we harvest will be the vessel in which the wine ferments and ages.  For many years now I've been a fan of the wines of Gravner from Friuli in Northeastern Italy and COS winery in SE Sicily, which use clay amphora in which to ferment and age on the skins a percentage of their grapes.  Gravner known for skin fermenting the white wine grape Ribolla, Cos for Nero and another variety potentially suited for Australia, Frappato.   This ancient technique of winemaking has it's roots in Caucasia, where winemaking may well have started in the Bronze Age, and is still alive and well in Georgia today. We held a tasting recently with other growers and winemakers looking at Southern Italian whites and reds, and Nero in particular.   The COS lineup was really strong, showing Nero alone and with Cabernet and Frappato, and of course the amphora aged Pithos, which was so unusually savoury and elegant. Look for these wines, they are something special. I wanted to experiment with some amphora, since I had tasted some thrilling examples and believe the vessel gives the wine an earthier texture than stainles steel or wood.  Furthermore, being the first to grow Nero in McLaren Vale, I also wanted to make it special, so I was on the hunt for a potter that was up to the challenge.

 

After weeks of following leads and making visits, I finally located someone with a big enough kiln to fire the amphora, and who also had the technical ability to get it done.  Two of the four we will use this year are at the top of this page. We are visiting Sicily this year to explore COS, whose "Pithos" is 100 percent amphora aged, and the other Sicilian wineries known for working with Nero, like Tasca d'Almerita and Planeta, for example. I'm sure it will be a huge experience. The COS winery, as well as Gravner, has buried the amphora in the earth to help maintain an even temperature and humidity.  This year we added another 2 acres of Nero material which should keep us busy, as it does seem to need reigning in.  It also seems to be disease resistant and shows no signs yet of any viruses, as it has on a few other sites outside our district.  We are also keen to keep the water off it and let it become dry grown, since it doesn't seem to need much at all. And for a country hampered by drought conditions like Australia, that's a good idea.