NEXT week the Hunter Valley's Tyrrell's family wine company will mark a momentous event - the 50th anniversary of Australia's first commercially bottled and labelled chardonnay.
That inaugural 1971 Vat 47 chardonnay, which I recall enjoying in 2002, initially brought scorn but later ignited the nation's chardonnay boom.
On Saturday, July 1, the 50th anniversary and 49th vintage 2021 Vat 47 will go on sale at $110 a bottle at tyrrells.com.au, the Broke Road, Pokolbin, winery and fine wine stores. It's the 49th vintage because bushfires and smoke taint wiped out the 2020 harvest.
Also on July 1, Tyrrell's will release the 2017 Vat 1 Semillon ($115), 2021 Vat 9 Shiraz ($150), 2021 Vat 8 Shiraz-Cabernet ($110) and the cellar door only 2021 Vat 63 Chardonnay-Semillon ($65).
Last week I was given a pre-release tasting of the 2021 chardonnay wine with its deep gold hues, beguiling honeysuckle aromas and superb expressive golden peach front-palate flavour. The middle palate features fig, guava, spice, lemon curd and supple cashew oak, a finish of slatey acid. It gets my top rating of six stars.
For comparison, my hosts Tyrrell's chief Bruce Tyrrell, production director Chris Tyrrell, chief winemaker and Vat 47 maker Andrew Spinaze and group vineyard manager Andrew Pengilly trotted out the 2017, 2013, 2009 and 2005 Vat 47s from the museum cellar, giving wonderful insight into the longevity of the marque. The 2005 was remarkable for its freshness, rich gold tones, honeyed nose and palate of ripe white peach, fig, spice, brioche and restrained creamy oak
There's an extraordinary story behind Vat 47, which began when Tyrrell's patriarch Murray Tyrrell was introduced to French chardonnay-based white burgundies by art dealer and wine cognoscente Rudy Komon. When the French burgundies he loved became too expensive in the 1960s, Murray decided to make his own chardonnay.
But where could he find chardonnay vines? Aided by NSW viticulture chief Graham Gregory, small plots of chardonnay were found on the Mudgee Wines vineyard of Alf Kurtz and the then-Penfolds-owned Pokolbin HVD (Hunter Valley Distillery) vineyard. Kurtz made Australia's first straight chardonnay, labelled white pineau, in 1964 and Penfolds long used its chardonnay in a blend with Hunter semillon and labelled it Dalwood Pinot Riesling.
Penfolds wouldn't give Murray cuttings from its chardonnay, but on a 1967 moonlit night Murray climbed the HVD fence near the corner of Broke and Hermitage roads, to filch discarded, due-to-be-burned vine cuttings and plant them in his Short Flat vineyard. The vines in 1971 produced the first Vat 47, a tag applied because that was the number of the old oak cask the wine matured in.
Bruce Tyrrell recalls the early vintages were met with ridicule - the McWilliam's chief winemaker declaring "Well Murray you have messed that up, no one in Australia will drink white wine with oak in it". In the Brisbane Wine Show the judges gave it six out of 20 and Bruce jokes that the contents of the spit bucket got eight. The Brisbane chief judge opined "it is either volatile or oxidised or it's the greatest white wine ever seen in Australia" and, ironically, later that year it won best white wine of Adelaide Wine Show.
Since then Vat 47s have won 52 trophies and 228 gold medals in Australian wine shows - a success engendered by go-to-whoa meticulousness beginning in the Tyrrell vineyards.
Over the next three months vines will be given their vital annual "haircut". Last week I watched while a team of 25 local vineyard workers and backpackers using battery-powered shears and saws to prune the Short Flat vines. Against the inspiring backdrop of the Brokenback Range, vines were trimmed back to two canes spaced left and right so fruiting will be balanced.
Managing Tyrrell's vineyards and its 10 hectares of more than 100-year-old "sacred site" vines, Andrew Pengilly started his career at Wynns Coonawarra Estate, where he helped develop new vineyards in the emerging Robe area, then worked at Petaluma, managed various vineyards in Clare Valley and joined Tyrrell's in 2006.
Short Flat vineyard, sitting below Murray Tyrrell's home, now occupied by his grandson Chris, wife Tegan and their sons Henry and Edward, is a patchwork of 13.31 hectares of chardonnay, semillon, shiraz and pinot noir. The chardonnay blocks include Murray Tyrrell's original 1968 planting of vines propagated from the cuttings purloined from HVD vineyard, which wryly was sold to Tyrrell's by Penfolds in 1983.
The painstaking approach that produces Vat 47 continues into the winery as the grapes are hand-picked, cleaned and sorted and gently crushed in an Italian hydraulically-powered basket press.
Winemaker Andrew Spinaze keeps the juice from the Short Flat Apple Tree, Mary Anne's, Roadblock, Andrew's and Old vines blocks separate and ferments and new French oak matures each individually, only later blending and bottling the various components into Vat 47.
With a mother of Irish parentage and a father of Italian descent, Spinaze grew up on the family dairy farm at Lismore.
Spinaze's interest in winemaking grew out of helping his brother and grandfather in their homebrewing activities.
After finishing school he worked on a vintage at the Arrowfield winery at Jerrys Plains in the Hunter Valley and then took on a wine production-marketing degree course at South Australia's Roseworthy College and graduated in 1980.
"Spinners", as he is known around the Tyrrell winery, has overseen production of Vat 47 since 1981 and loves working with chardonnay, considering the Short Flat one of Australia's best sites for the variety.
