Padthaway. Weird name. Once a mere anonymous little village in the fertile south-east corner of South Australia populated by a few homes and a rather proud and (once) competitive football club, Padthaway is today a busy little focal point of more than 3,000 hectares of vineyard. It also lends its name to the recently approved Padthaway GI, an area encompassing 345 square kilometres. It first came to my attention in 1980 when, as a student of agricultural science at Melbourne University I found myself approved to do some vacation work there for Lindemans. So the next thing I did was to look at a map to find out where it was! Back in the early 1980s nobody cared much for wine quality at Padthaway. With the exception of the Lindemans Padthaway range its name didn’t appear on a wine label, since adjacent vineyards to the north owned by Seppelt and Hardy were using the name of Keppoch, another minuscule local hamlet. Most of the local production went into wine casks and also into the very cheapest wines these companies put in bottles. I found that working there you felt about as much a part of the premium wine industry as a bottle-washer for Barossa Pearl. The numbers that mattered were tonnes per acre and yields were literally pumped up by vineyard managers who would splash their riches of water like Midas counting his petty currency. Some still watered their lands by flooding them. Others hurtled their sub-artesian reserves around in massive arcs with powerful sprinklers which, like a burst fire hydrant, could soak a football oval in minutes. So, no longer blessed with limitless supplies of low-salt underground water, the region is taking stock and has moved to drip irrigation, joining the 20th century by the skin of its viticultural teeth. The increasing salinity has now stabilised to an extent, although local growers say they are presently being frustrated by State Government red tape in their efforts to recharge the local underground acquifer with fresh water from a creek. Not only have Padthaway’s viticulturists moved towards a water deficit approach to irrigation, but they’ve discovered that by dramatically reducing yields from at least 20 to 12 tonnes per hectare and below, Padthaway can actually make excellent table wine. Two issues ago I covered the rise of Orlando’s Lawson’s Shiraz to top-shelf status in the hotly-contested premium shiraz market. About two years ago OnWine reported that BRL Hardy cut its cropping and its watering of its Padthaway vineyards with the result that sites which had previously just made cask-standard red were actually contributing to the premier red wine in its stable, the Eileen Hardy Shiraz. That’s hardly surprising when you consider that amongst Padthaway’s present 3,064 ha of vines are substantial areas of mature vines around 30 years of age. Take into account that there’s a shortage of mature vine wine in Australia today and Padthaway’s vineyard looks more and more valuable every day. Padthaway’s landscape changed forever in early 1998. That’s when BRL Hardy commissioned its 10,000 tonne Stonehaven winery, the region’s first major winery development, which heralded the first time a substantial portion of Padthaway’s huge production would actually be made into wine in the region itself. Stonehaven serves as a regional winery for BRL’s substantial Limestone Coast plantings, also found at Wrattonbully (160 ha), the Elgin Valley (80 ha) and Coonawarra (127 ha). The company also has contracts with nineteen growers in the various areas. Senior Padthaway winemaker Tom Newton well remembers the start to his first Stonehaven vintage. ‘People turned up to work on the first week in February and we picked on the 22nd. We had thirty people, five of whom had done a vintage before. We also had two Friday the 13ths that vintage and both lived up to their name.’ Newton, who hadn’t made much red prior to his arrival at Stonehaven, has relished the challenge. Not unnaturally, his reds reflect his white wine making background. They’re fairly and squarely built around ripe, clean fruit and their oak influences are evident, but hardly dominant. His whites, which to date have been predominantly chardonnay, are a breath of fresh air in these days of wine show-driven over oakiness and fatness. Stonehaven releases two levels of wine, the ‘Premium’ and ‘Limited Release’ wines which sell for around $16 and $25 respectively. The Limited Release wines are sourced from the vineyard’s best and older sites and are made with more winemaking influence. Newton enjoys the lemon/grapefruit flavours occasionally evident in Padthaway chardonnay and reserves the blocks which best express this character for his Limited Release Chardonnay. Looking to manage his chardonnay vines to produce the right flavour spectrum for his wines, he finds that if the canopies are too dense and crowded he gets green and tropical flavours, but if he opens them too much he finds ‘marmalade’ and ‘custard’ characters. They’re not long-term wines, according to Newton, who most enjoys their fruit and development between 2-4 years of age. Happy to concede that Coonawarra’s cabernet is superior, Newton enjoys the extra richness of Padthaway cabernet, which he considers ideal for a blending component with cabernet and merlot from Wrattonbully and Coonawarra. Finding it medium to full in weight, Newton’s not about to turn Padthaway shiraz into a richer Clare Valley or McLaren Vale style, but deploys a range of techniques such as natural fermentation, hand-plunging and whole berry fermentation to improve its range of expression in finished wine. He’s fortunate that the winery, large as it is, was designed to made wine in separate 20 tonne batches if required, so he’s able to keep track of different treatments. With a low-yielding 2000 vintage more than imminent Newton is expecting to crush only 7,500 tonnes, well down from the 9,600 in 1999. The cold snap during flowering last year has greatly reduced crops in several regions, especially in Coonawarra where some of the older blocks are down by 50%. I’m very impressed by the quality and value delivered by the new Stonehaven releases. They make a point of difference in the marketplace and, despite a regrettable Black Tower influence in their choice of bottle, make a fine fruit-driven statement about the direction towards which Australian wine should be more focused. Stonehaven’s impact in Padthaway has been nothing less than dramatic. After Padthaway Estate it brought the second cellar door into the region and it has begun to stop traffic in an area through which travellers would never before have thought of calling. It’s given impetus to the steadily increasing number of local families employed by the wine industry and is even helping the region finally to develop a wine culture. Maybe one day they’ll even offer Stonehaven at the Padthaway Football Club? That’s something I’d like to see!
