McLaren Vale shiraz is riding the crest of a wave. Dark, ripe and concentrated, it’s vino fortissimo – a spicy, sumptuous, savoury partner to a battery of enough new American oak to overpower almost any other wine. And the strongest, richest and roundest I have experienced in some years are those created by Sparky and Sarah Marquis at Fox Creek. Everything about Fox Creek is happening at a million miles an hour. The company received its producers licence on October 25, 1995. The day later its brilliant Reserve Shiraz 1994 (reviewed in the August 1996 issue of OnWine) won the 1995 Bushing Festival Trophy for the best wine made from McLaren Vale fruit at the region’s famous festival, annointing its wedded pair of winemakers as Bushing King and Queen for the year. Sparky Marquis is a former Roseworthy winemaking dux, lecturer and associate judge at the Canberra Wine Show who was in his second year at Roseworthy in 1987 when Sarah began there and says he spent the next five years chasing her to marry him. Both are well travelled overseas and around Australia while making wine. Fox Creek’s deep, inky, opulent, multi-layered reds really get the blood up. Not quite so thick you could carve them, they’re still surprisingly soft and approachable throughout the untempered stages of youth, but they’re made with the long term in mind. In keeping with the pace that things happen around Fox Creek, the 1994 Reserve Shiraz (of which 1,000 cases were made) sold out in moments and the 1995 edition (only 700cases) is following in similar footsteps. It’s highly likely there will be much, much more of Fox Creek red from future vintages. Fox Creek Wines is owned by four vineyard-owning families in McLaren Vale. Its three vineyard sites of Fox Creek, Koona and Malpas Ridge cropped around 500 tonnes in 1996, of which around 105 tonnes of the best were devoted to the Fox Creek label; the rest sold in bulk. The vineyards are ultimately expected to crop around 650 tonnes, giving the Fox Creek plenty of room to expand. About 200 tonnes will be shiraz, 160 tonnes chardonnay, the remainder being divided between cabernet sauvignon, semillon, cabernet franc, verdelho, sauvignon blanc, grenache and merlot. First planted in 1985 by Sarah’s brother, Paul Watts, the Fox Creek vineyard was one of the first in South Australia given the expensive modern techniques of vertical shoot positioning (VSP) and Scott-Henry trellising, designed to maximise fruit exposure and the efficiency of every vine. Fox Creek’s Reserve Shirazes have all come from this block, which crops low, around 3 tonnes per acre. ‘We want to make a concentrated style’, says Sparky Marquis. ‘The ’95 has a little more finesse than the ’94, but we want to keep the same big fruit.’ The Reserve Shirazes are matured in 100% new American oak, of which around 25-30% is heavy toast, the rest medium. Results tend to confirm Sparky’s belief that American oak can be both powerful and integrated. VSP and Scott-Henry vineyard systems lend themselves to mechanical harvesting, an enduring source of controversy amongst those dedicated to premium wine. Things have certainly improved with mechanical harvesters since my experience at Padthaway and Coonawarra in the early 1980s, when expensive wine was made from fruit which basically came into the winery already pulverised before it saw a crusher. ‘You can run along behind a Gregoire with a suit on and not get wet’, Sparky enthuses. ‘They’re fantastic.’ These new harvesters, of which Fox Creek now owns two, gently massage grapes from the vine with little bruising or juicing. ‘We harvested our one year-old chardonnay with a Gregoire and I couldn’t work out which rows were hand-picked or machined’, he says. Their two machines enable Sparky and Sarah Marquis total flexibility at harvest time, enabling them to pick any row at any time they like, ‘even if it then takes two hours to wash the harvester down’, adds Sparky. ‘Every second or third day Sarah and I go around and taste all the different varieties and work out where we’re going. We pick three quarters on taste and one quarter on chemical analysis. The crew is on standby the whole time.’ If you’re too late to find the 1995 Reserve Shiraz, make a note to get in early for the ’96. The release date for the 1995 Reserve Cabernet is imminent. My final tip concerns your Christmas luncheon, an event for which you are hereby advised to mark with a bottle of Fox Creek’s sparkling blend of cabernet franc, shiraz and cabernet sauvignon, named ‘Vixen’ for a variety of reasons which may become even more obvious later on.
