Much as I love the humble apple, nobody could be happier than I to see the grape supplant it on Lenswood’s centre stage. Lenswood has burst onto the wine scene, going straight to the top shelf without the messing around and experimentation associated with most new wine areas. No other Australian wine region has been blessed with such a winemaking and viticultural headstart. Aside from a couple of tiny producers, the area’s sole winemakers are Stephen Henschke, Tim Knappstein and Geoff Weaver. While Henschke and Knappstein have long been associated with the excellent wines of their family companies, Weaver left the job of chief winemaker at Hardys in 1992, taking on Stafford Ridge full-time. Given that its vineyards are so close and planted to essentially the same varieties, the sheer diversity and range of Lenswood’s wines comes as something of a surprise. ‘You can’t expect guys like us not to have developed our own ideas about how wine should be made’, says Knappstein. ‘Over time these differences will even out and become more superficial as the quality of our fruit comes through’, adds Geoff Weaver. ‘Our wines all have some things in common: depth and length, subtlety and complexity.’ Lenswood is a tiny sub-region within the Adelaide Hills whose climate fits somewhere between Alsace and Auckland; cool enough to nurture intense, fine flavours, yet sufficiently warm to allow the full ripening of most varieties. Its soils are ancient, well-drained and relatively unfertile grey clay loams and deep red clay loams, while its frequently steep slopes between 20-40% have proven no barrier to viticulture. Its vineyards have a distinctly European feel and flavour. Today the Knappsteins’ Lenswood Vineyards, the area’s largest, shortly to become 26.3 ha. The Henschkes have 16.9 ha of vines, while the Weavers will have a total of 12.5 ha under vine at their Stafford Ridge vineyard. Stafford Ridge and Lenswood Vineyards both grow intensely-flavoured, succulent sauvignon blancs. The Stafford Ridge matches snow-pea herbaceous flavours with ripe tropical fruit, while the Lenswood Vineyards wine reveals piercing blackcurrant, gooseberry and passionfruit flavours and a mere hint of grassiness. The rieslings of Henschke and Stafford Ridge have intense, lingering fruit and sharpish acids. Stafford Ridge’s style is restrained and perfumed; while the Henschke Greens Hill Riesling is fragrant, Germanic and tropical in its youth. Chardonnay is Lenswood’s outstanding white and it’s here that the three different approaches to winemaking are most clearly revealed. Each maker adopts a slightly different tack to the maximisation of winemaking-derived complexity to complement the region’s excellent varietal fruit. ‘I don’t look for fruit at all in my chardonnay’, says Weaver. ‘I’m not interesting in making wine with primary flavours. You never taste grapes as such in Burgundy.’ Weaver puts all his chardonnay through malolactic fermentation, then leaves it on lees for twelve months, sulphured but not stirred. ‘With concentrated cool area fruit there’s not much risk of over-dominant malolactic or lees characters’, he said, a view clearly supported by Knappstein, whose chardonnay is perhaps the most powerful, succulent and heavily worked of the three. Henschke’s ‘Croft’ chardonnay is a sweeter, buttery/cashew style with more assertive, firm oak which takes time to integrate. If the pinot noirs from Lenswood Vineyards are amongst the best in Australia, the Henschkes’ is not far behind. Knappstein’s style is up-front, intense and fragrant, with a soft, fleshy texture and remarkably pristine fruit. Less dense and a little more heavily oaked and heavily pressed, the Henschke wines deliver sweet pinot flavours in a made-to-cellar structure. Henschke and Stafford Ridge fashion greatly diverse blends of cabernet sauvignon and merlot. Named ‘Abbot’s Prayer’, the Henschke blend is a sumptuous, savoury wine of surprising richness, astringency and length. A truly individual interpretation of cool-climate red wine and suited to long-term cellaring, it is exactly the sort of wine you would expect of a man who cut his teeth on Cyril Henschke Cabernet Sauvignon. The Stafford Ridge style is more reminiscent of St-Julien: an elegant, restrained wine which develops in weight and complexity in the bottle with mushroomy, earthy, autumnal qualities. The 1990 is the benchmark to date, although later vintages reflect longer periods of oak maturation and longer maceration on skins. Weaver aims for fine-grained, dusty tannins and for more complexity as he moves from ‘simpler to more complex winemaking’. He regards palate structure and complexity a more important indicator of quality than fruit intensity himself. That’s why, for example, he regards the bright, polished 1993 wine as slightly atypical, since it comes from a warmer season. So far it may only be the tiniest of dots, but Lenswood has well and truly arrived onto the wine map.
