It was like being a kid in a lolly shop’, recalls Jim Brayne. ‘Here we were, looking at hundred year-old shiraz vines in Coonawarra. Now there’s a temptation for a winemaker to have a fling!’ Jim Brayne is chief winemaker for McWilliams, the company which first bought into Brand’s Laira in 1990, completed the buy-out three years later and which has ploughed roughly $20 million of capital and infrastructure into one of Coonawarra’s traditional labels. Like many other family-owned and operated wine businesses, Brand’s was feeling the pinch at the end of the 1980s. The Brands found the ideal partner and then owner in McWilliams, another family-owned wine business. It says something for the match that the Brand family remains very involved in a hands-on way at Brand’s Laira. McWilliams has extended the Brand’s vineyard from around 35 ha to 258 ha, but has only modestly increased the winery’s processing capacity, from 400 tonnes to 1,000 tonnes. An enormous slice of the vineyard’s total production – presently around 50% – ends as part of McWilliams’ $9-10 Hanwood range, processed in its entirity in Griffith. Thirty percent of the vineyards’ production is earmarked for the McWilliams regional collection, so only the top 20% finds its way under a Brand’s Laira label. Astonishingly, McWilliams has never sold more than 12,000 cases of Brand’s wine in any given year. As they mature, the company’s younger vineyards are likely to be upgraded from Hanwood to the McWilliams regional label and ultimately to Brand’s. At a time when many first and second crop vineyards are being used by other makers for very expensive wine, one has to admire the restraint behind such a quality-based selection. McWilliams has even singled out its best red soils within its various vineyards for special treatment and has already discovered they ripen at least one degree Baume ahead of the rest of their blocks. According to Brayne, says it’s been relatively straightforward to push the limits with Brand’s Laira using big company power. ‘McWilliams hedges its bets on others, so we can take more risks with the top Brand’s wines, especially the Stentiford’s Shiraz and the Patron’s Reserve. We’ve more resources, access to more and better fine grained French oak, and can take more risks on harvest time’, he says. ‘With firstly Bruce Gregory and now current winemaker Peter Weinberg we’re using riper fruit to makes wines of greater concentration, length and structure. We’re not just aiming for riper sugars, but flavours and tannins. For the Stentiford’s we want shiraz with full flavours and velvet tannins, giving intensity and elegance. We’re also finishing the ferment in oak to give better integration and may put the wine back into another lot of brand-new oak for a second year if it needs it.’ The first Stentiford’s was from 1995, but some may remember the Original Vineyard Shiraz that came from the same century-old single vineyard’s fruit. It’s one of the most exciting ‘new’ wines to come out of Coonawarra in decades. Vineyard size dictates a production ceiling of around 500-600 cases. It’s not an individual vineyard wine, so there’s scope to create more Patron’s Reserve, provided it meets some fairly demanding quality standards. The first wine was a stunner from the excellent 1996 season, a brooding, tight and intensely flavoured wine that tends to make the somewhat simpler and leafier 1997 edition pale somewhat. The core of the wine is old cabernet sauvignon and shiraz from the original Laira vineyard. Some might find McWilliams’ attitude towards its Coonawarra vineyards hard-edged and even ruthless, others may wonder how the economics work when you put Coonawarra fruit into wines costing under $10 per bottle. Either way, there’s no doubt that the biggest winner in this equation is the wine drinker, who has every reason to view the Brand’s label with renewed confidence.
