For a few moments after his departure from Howard Park, John Wade was genuinely concerned about what he was going to do. And then the telephone started ringing. Wade has deliberately kept a very low profile in the media since he parted ways from the iconic brand which he created. It has taken some time for the dust to settle over the various loose ends inevitably left when a founding partner suddenly becomes disassociated with a business and Wade has determined that irrespective of a substantial amount of incorrect and negative publicity in Perth circles, he will only tell his side of the story when he is ready to. And that time is not now. More importantly from the perspective of the interested Australian wine drinker is what, exactly, this rare wine making talent has got himself involved in, and when we shall see the results. Typically, it’s a question that takes some answering, for Wade has again become thoroughly immersed in many aspects of the wine industry, and not only in WA. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly for the legion of John Wade followers is the imminent debut of his own label, largely grown and made from something he once said he’d never have – his own vineyard. The first wine under the new John Wade label will be a Riesling, vintage 2000, from the Porongorup Ranges, to be reviewed in the next OnWine Report. It will retail for around $20. Yanwirra, John Wade’s new property, and a newly-pruned one at that, is near Denmark, the town he has made his home for the better part of two decades. It harbours a small but largely fruit-salad ten year-old vineyard from which Wade will create two red wines, based on the left bank and right bank Bordeaux themes. One will be a blend focused around cabernet sauvignon, with merlot and cabernet franc providing richness and complexity, while the other will be the classic right bank merlot cabernet franc blend. It’s early days, but Wade expects them to retail around $25. He’s been handling fruit from this vineyard for some years and knows its fruit, which he believes to be ideally suited to the more laid-back reds he is looking to make. ‘They’re likely to be 10 year wines as opposed to something more intense and longer-living’, he says. A dry white blend of semillon, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay and riesling from the same vineyard will also be released in the near future. While he’s keen to get his hands on more expensive fruit, Wade isn’t about to rush in with a more complex hierarchy of wines. He’s prepared to wait the three to four years it may take to get the right fruit sourcing for a ‘reserve’ quality label. For the time being at least, he’s enjoying the first vineyard he’s ever owned more than he ever thought he would. ‘When the new reds come out they’ll be the first ever from John Wade grown fruit’, he says. ‘Whether that’s a plus or a minus is up to those who try them.’ As you’d expect, a ten-acre vineyard isn’t big enough to tie down this pint-sized winemaking dynamo. Wade has been able to pick the eyes from the not insignificant number of consultancies offered to him. Two of the three prospectuses for whom he consults are based in Margaret River and include the Settlement 22 project listed in the first week of August, and Watershed, also recently listed. Settlement 22 is a 3,000 tonne winemaking, tourism and restaurant development while Watershed is a 800 tonnes vineyard and winery development. The other prospectus involving Wade’s talents is the Domaine Tatiara project at Coldstream in the Yarra Valley, a red wine project designed to peak at 400 tonnes. It’s important to Wade that unlike many capital-raising wine ventures which revert to the original owners on an expiry date, each of these projects involve the initial investors obtaining a share in the land and the winery. Wade is also involved as a consultant to other Western Australian ventures including Wise Wines near Dunsborough in the northern part of the Margaret River, Hotham Valley at Wandering, the Ortona vineyard in Margaret River and its ‘Virgin Block’ label, Mount Hallowell vineyard at Denmark and the Porongorup Winery, a development owned and operated by the vineyards of Chatsfield, Jingalla, Montgomery’s Hill and Ironwood. While Wade oversees the winemaking he has installed a winemaker there, Rob Lee. He also retains a specific arrangement with Mongomery’s Hill. Wade is happy to have again become so involved in consulting and considers it a means for him to contribute to the solution of what he considers to be an emerging problem in Australian wine – the explosion of plantings and wineries. ‘I’m concerned that the standard of winemaking in the west has gone down hill at a rate of knots, so I’m taking an active role in overseeing what some winemakers are doing’, he says. ‘Without exception I’ve had to retrain winemakers and take them back to the basics. Most love to finesse and make a complex product, but you can’t do that unless you really understand the basic principals involved. If you keep the process as simple as possible, it’s easier to manage if you get into a problem. The moment you start finessing and get a problem, it just takes too much to get out of it.’ For over a decade John Wade has been telling me of the danger represented to Australian wine by a problem most winemakers only associate with the US – brettanomyces, a yeast able to ruin red wine with mousey, horse-hair and used bandage flavours. It’s largely found in wines made with low regimes of sulphur dioxide and when wines have been left ‘dirty’ on fermentation lees for long periods. According to Wade there’s so much around today that most winemakers don’t even recognise its influence for what it is and don’t even know they have it. I agree entirely and am no longer surprised to see around five to ten percent of wines in tastings with this fault. ‘And how many winemakers have gone for the recipe that the riper the sugar the riper the flavours?’ he asks. ‘Down the track these wines fall in a heap; there’s nothing to them, they’re lifeless. It all comes back to the maturation of flavours, not alcohol levels. It’s garbage that we have to pick above 13.5%’, he argues, again to my total agreement. ‘I’d like to think that down the track I helped to get winemakers to slow down and look at what they’re doing, thinking about their styles and processes. Too many get into vintage and forget all about it. Right now there’s a real rash of young Turks with academic backgrounds who think that’s going to get them through.’ To place your allocation of the new John Wade wines, contact him by postage to PO Box 23, Denmark, WA, 6333 or by e-mail to [email protected].
