Imagine the horror. A crusty, calloused hand coloured the dirty black-purple of newly laid asphalt and scratched repeatedly, reaches forward to shake yours. Your own hand instantly and involuntarily recoils. “It’s all right, cabernet does that to you. I’m a wine maker”, he says softly, innocently revealing a similarly disfigured left palm. Your mind races. It did say ‘Hospital’ outside, didn’t it? You must be in Adelaide! He is wearing a long white jacket. What month is it? April? Yes! Could it be? Max Lake?? No, you said Adelaide! Well, in that case, it must be Dr Richard Hamilton!! Thank heavens he wears gloves! “Plastic surgeon, heal thyself!”, I hear you plead. Yes, he does have to apologise to patients for the state of his hands. There’s not much you can do as a winemaker about the pigments and tannins of Australia’s favourite red grape variety, unless you drop it and take up making moselle. But what is it like being a leading plastic surgeon who spends about five weeks a year in an environment almost custom-built to play havoc with your hands? “I’m certainly worried about being dependent on them for my living”, he says, “for it would be so easy to damage my hands in the winery. If I’m cleaning a piece of equipment or machinery I don’t trust anyone else to turn it off first. I have to pull the plug out of the socket myself. And yes, they are insured for quite a bit.” Sensible man. I should also have asked him whether his palate is insured as well. It would be so easy to toss a tumbler of sulphuric acid down the throat in the hospital lab. After all, it is the same colour as water. Many Australian wine-drinkers will be pleased enough just to know that Dr Richard Hamilton is real. The Richard Hamilton label has been with us since the early ‘seventies, but claims of people purporting to be the actual Richard Hamilton are rare. Not only is he real, but he’s one of the legendary Australian doctors who not only dabble in wine, but get in it up to the ears as well. He’s a hand’s-on winemaker who runs a private practice, operates in a public hospital and owns two wine labels, Richard Hamilton and Leconfield. Hamilton is ably assisted in his winery at Leconfield, Coonawarra, by noted ex-Hungerford Hill winemaker, Ralph Fowler, and in the marketing and existential departments by Brian Miller, ex-Seppelt and Mitchelton. Working vintage every year and keeping in close contact with the vineyards and winery over the weekend, he still manages to squeeze in around seventy to eighty hours of practical medicine. Apart from that, he’s probably bone idle. The two principal wines of the Leconfield and Richard Hamilton portfolios are the Richard Hamilton Chardonnay and Leconfield Cabernet Sauvignon. Priced beneath them, and beneath ten dollars as well, is the firm’s range of ‘fighting varietals’, the Hamilton Estate Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. Richard Hamilton Wines is a McLaren Vale label. Talk to people in the wine industry and the buzz is McLaren Vale Chardonnay, where the burgundian grape regularly achieves ripe, generous flavours of peaches, cashews and juicy, tropical fruit. Unknown to most people, it was first planted in the area by the good Dr Hamilton in 1975, from which his first wine was made in 1978. Since then, the Richard Hamilton Chardonnay has been a consistently fine example of sensitive winemaking, utilizing ripe but not over-ripe fruit and balancing it with subtle, rather than aggressive oak. Having met the restrained, controlled and even almost reserved Richard Hamilton, it is impossible to imagine him over-oaking a wine. “I’m aiming for fruit, fullness and drinkability, so I pick slightly earlier to avoid excessively rich, buttery characters and to retain maximum levels of natural acidity”, he explains. He ferments the entire wine in barrel to extract a balanced complement of oak, uses a small amount of solids fermentation and skin contact to give some grip and additional complexity, and puts a component of the wine through a secondary fermentation. Further careful oka maturation then follows, in new through to two year-old casks. I am all in favour of the result. The currently-available 1990 wine shows fresh, clean peachy and tropical fruit, length on the palate and soft acids. It will cellar well for at least the medium term of five years and cleans up nicely with crisp acids. It retails around $14. I have had a soft spot for Leconfield Cabernet Sauvignon since 1983, when Richard Hamilton enthused to me that his 1978 vintage had such elegance, fineness and complexity it could perhaps be French, meaning Bordeaux. The wine was a delight, for those very reasons. I also remember the 1982, a wine from a warmer vintage, which as a callow twenty-four year-old, I said combined the finesse of Nureyev with the muscle of Schwarzenegger in a way that seemed perfectly natural. And that was before Terminator One! Revisiting the wine recently I was surprised that it had developed quite so quickly, but pleased to see its characteristic black olive quality remain. Again, Richard Hamilton looks for elegance in his wine, and Ralph Fowler is certainly helping to deliver. “I want flavour without heaviness, richness without jamminess, although I admit it can be a fine line”, says Hamilton. Don’t expect the all-too-common mulberry jam flavour of Coonawarra’s larger landowners in the Leconfield Cabernet Sauvignon 1990. Instead you will find more of the real Coonawarra regional characters – an elegant, fine, perfumed red with the potential to develop in the bottle and not turn brown after three years like so many today. The wine retails at $20 per bottle. I ask Hamilton if he has ever been tempted to follow the mob, save some money and prune his vines by machine. “I’d sell the vineyard first”, he replies. The only future for small guys like us lies in a hands-on operation.” Music to my ears, hopefully to yours as well. Here is a practising doctor with a very significant investment in wine who is doing most things right. He’s prepared to get his hands dirty, even though they’re worth more than the whole of me. He’s looking ahead and concentrating on what his company does best, while adhering to his own principles in wine style and quality. As far as you and I are concerned, Richard Hamilton offers two consistently individual, restrained table wines of considerable stature at sensible prices. I look forward to a future of more Richard Hamilton Chardonnay and Leconfield Cabernet Sauvignon.
