Born into the second generation of a family of Hunter Valley winegrowers, Andrew Margan now making a name for himself as a maker of traditional Hunter wine varieties to which he imparts his own particular and contemporary spin. While the Margan brand has a typical regional focus on semillon, verdelho, shiraz and chardonnay, to which he has added merlot and cabernet sauvignon, Andrew Margan deliberately makes juicier, fleshier wines than the Hunter norm, each unashamedly fine-tuned for early drinking. While the Margan label only appeared after its inaugural vintage of 1997, Andrew Margan is no stranger to wine making. His twenty-five years experience includes a total of 20 vintages at various times for the Hunter icon winery of Tyrrell’s, a year at Chateau Rahoul in Graves, spells in the Languedoc and Moldova as a flying winemaker, plus another three years working with the well-known consultant and entrepreneur Hugh Ryman. After these European experiences he returned to Australia with a conviction that too many wines are ‘made to a formula or for longevity’. ‘I’m not interested in that’, he says. ‘I want to make wines that I want to drink.’ It’s their disarming honesty and freshness that sets Margan wine apart from so many made today. While they’re hardly about to shake the likes of Leeuwin Estate, Giaconda or Mount Mary off their perches, they offer a distinctive combination of varietal flavour, approachability and occasionally complex character rare in wines intended to peak early. Margan remains convinced that the Hunter is the right place to make such wines, since he has found ‘many cool climate wines have lean palates with high levels of acids’, while ‘hotter climates can produce heavy tannins’, none of which would figure well in the wines he wants to make. Andrew Margan augments the fruit from the 50 acre vineyard he owns with his wife, Lisa, with that from other local growers on the deep-draining red volcanic soils of the Broke Fordwich sub-region of the Lower Hunter Valley. He waters sparely and only fertilises occasionally to produce intensely flavoured fruit cropped low at around two tonnes per acre, whose qualities he then protects and carefully augments within the 700 tonne capacity winery he built on the Ceres Hill property in time for the 1998 vintage. Contrary to the prevalent trend towards the excessive use of oak in red wine, Andrew Margan takes a more traditional European approach. A small proportion of his generously proportioned and citrusy Chardonnay is fermented in oak, imparting some oak texture and complexity to the early-drinking finished wine. Similarly, the Merlot receives a short time in new American oak – long enough to impart some toasty vanilla influence and creaminess, not enough to rob the wine of its penetrative primary berry and cherry fruit flavours. Margan doesn’t age his Shiraz in any new oak at all, since he believes that approach would compromise its distinctive spicy, peppery varietal flavours and clutter the savoury finish and soft tannins of its attractive, if uncomplicated palate. ‘If a wine has richness and ripe fruit on its middle palate, new oak can only ruin its innate fruit structure’, he believes. There’s a little more overt American oak influence in his Cabernet Sauvignon which, despite the region’s patchy track record with this grape, is usually vibrant, tight and fine-grained: consistently one of Margan’s best wines. As you might expect, neither the Margan Semillon nor Verdelho are matured in oak. Each are however bottled with more brightness, richness and juiciness than most Hunter expressions of these grapes and don’t require as much cellaring to reveal their best form. Looking outside the Hunter Valley, Andrew Margan is also introducing a new label to the market, the House of Certain Views, whose wines pair classic red varieties with new viticultural regions in NSW, such as Orange Shiraz and Mt Kaputar Merlot. At their affordable prices, Margan wines rarely fail to deliver. That’s why they’re so often found on the wine lists of better bistros and cafes – even in Melbourne, where wine from the Hunter Valley is no easier to sell than holiday packages to Kabul.
