Discovering a wine lover’s paradise in Australia’s Yarra Valley | Canada Voices

The deer was served for lunch because the deer would have devoured the vines.

We were eating at Luke Lambert’s place in the Yarra Valley, in the Australian state of Victoria. The venison, an invasive Sambar deer, was something Lambert had shot on the property earlier that year. “They love vines,” he said. “And they’re delicious.”

He had poured a 2024 shiraz made from grapes grown a valley away, at Denton Wines, where he’d been the winemaker for several years. Over his career, he had made a lot of shirazes, and this was the second or third, he said, that he was actually proud of. It was restrained yet complex, full of dark fruit and silky tannins.

Lambert’s real passion, though, is Barolo. He discovered it in his twenties, and he’s since spent his life trying to make a worthy Australian nebbiolo. On a granite-rich hillside, he’s dedicating his life to one grape, a risky bet in an industry that’s at the mercy of nature and shifting tastes. Over the meal, we drank his 2021 nebbiolo from Denton and talked about art and winemaking. He insisted that what he does isn’t art. Just farming. Just process. We disagreed.

Six months later, my partner Carlyle Routh and I, alongside our friends and family, would be standing in the field of a farm we’d just bought near Port Hope, Ont., planting our first row of a small vineyard. As good luck would have it, an Australian-born winemaker with decades of Canadian experience had also moved in down the road. I’m not sure I would have felt so confident planting those vines if I hadn’t met him, or had that lunch with Luke, 16,000 kilometres away in the heart of one of Australia’s most inspiring wine regions.

Carlyle and I landed in Melbourne in late December and headed north. A few hours out of the city, on the road to Alpine Valleys and Beechworth, the countryside starts folding into mountains. It reminded me of Squamish, B.C.: raging rivers, peaks and valleys, cars with kayaks and mountain bikes strapped to the roof. This country is full of pioneers and dreamers who’ve built something out of nothing. We arrived looking for winemakers doing something interesting at their own pace and scale.

We first met Stephen Morris of Pennyweight Winery, whose family’s wine roots go back to the 1860s, when the Victorian gold rush swept through the area. One hundred and sixty years later, Stephen and his family make organic, hand-harvested wines that sit closer to the finesse of Oregon than the bold Australian shiraz that usually gets exported to Canada. “Not as many people are drinking wine as they used to,” Morris said. “It’s painfully obvious what the problem is. The wine’s no good.” He proceeded to pour an elegant, savoury semillon and sauvignon blanc blend that was impeccable.

A short drive away, on a road that’s escaped the surveillance of Google Maps, is the property that the husband-and-wife team behind Mayford Wines call home. Bryan Nicholson, a career forester, spotted the place from the air during a survey in the late 1980s. It had no road, power or water. Eleana Anderson, a plant biochemist with an honours degree in South African literature, met him a decade later. She was moved enough by the man and the property to start a new life, and now she leads their winemaking. Her tempranillo, a grape that every neighbour told her not to plant, is the wine that first put Mayford on the map. “We’re not subscribed to the bigger-is-better theory,” she said, hand resting on a vine. “We found our happy balance.”

From the Alpine Valleys, we drove south into the epicentre of Victorian cool-climate wine, the Yarra Valley. In the town of Healesville is Mike Emmett and his Barrique Wine Store. Emmett spent 20 years as a food and wine photographer. Post-COVID, he walked into Barrique one afternoon as a customer and walked out as its new owner. He’s since turned it into a community hub. Every Friday night, a different winemaker pours their latest work, a food truck pulls up out back, and a DJ spins vinyl. Chefs, vignerons, locals and tourists join in. “The collegiate sense of co-operation is ridiculous,” Emmett said. “During vintage, it’s, ‘hey, I’m short of bins, can you drop one?’ Everybody asks everybody everything. And does anything for anybody.”

Emmett was the one who warned me about Timo. He told me not to be fooled by the boyish, enfant terrible act. “He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He just says, ‘I’m just a farmer.’”

Timo Mayer ran away from his family’s centuries-old winemaking dynasty in Germany at 21 and landed in Key West washing dishes. He got into enough trouble that he fled, never to return. He met his Melbourne-born wife in a Florida restaurant kitchen, and they came to the Yarra Valley in 1996. Now, he makes 100-per-cent whole-bunch wine across several varieties: pinot noir, gamay, shiraz, even a cabernet. He controls the tannin profile of each wine by climbing into the tank and stomping around.

Sold from Tokyo to Toronto, Mayer’s wines are some of the most polarizing and prized in Australia. He’d rather keep company with vines than with suits. “Apparently there are people out there who don’t like Campari,” he said when we finally met. “And they’re the same people who don’t like my wines. Well, who the hell wants to be friends with those people?”

Stories of outsiders like Mayer arriving and thriving are everywhere in the region. There is Scott Bishop, a wine lover who studied oenology on the side and eventually moved from Papua New Guinea to take over Denton. There is Sara Grounds, who was born in Alaska, educated at Berkeley, spent eight years making wine in Oregon, and married into the Yarra. She runs marketing at Giant Steps, one of the region’s most decorated producers of single-vineyard pinot noir and chardonnay.

With swollen livers and heads full of new ideas, we drove south to Gippsland, at the bottom of Victoria, where the Bass Strait separates the mainland from Tasmania. With cooler, more predictable breezes and rainfall off the water, Gippsland may end up being more resilient to an increasingly chaotic climate. A handful of forward-thinking winemakers have been moving in, buying up cattle and dairy farms and turning them into vineyards.

David Chapman at Corner Inlet sold his house on the Mornington Peninsula to fund his project here. He had spent two decades watching grape harvest dates creep from May to February and noticed irrigated pinot noir lose its finesse and longevity as the years got hotter. “I want to be somewhere cooler,” he said, “and somewhere wetter.”

Down the road, Waratah Hills Vineyard claims to be Australia’s southernmost on the mainland and makes a sparkling wine worthy of Champagne: fine bubbles dissolving on the tongue, brioche and apple on the nose. And at the centre of the regional scene sits Marcus Satchell of Dirty Three Wines. A former jazz musician, Satchell trained alongside Mayer in the early ’90s and worked with Lambert too. In 2004, he came home to Gippsland to raise his twins and now seems to know everybody, with a hand in most of what’s happening in the region.

Before we left, we slipped one of our favourite Luke Lambert vintages into a local friend’s wine rack and scribbled on the label, “only to be opened with us when we return.” In that one bottle is a week of memories that will last a lifetime.

Not long after we got back home, we bought the farm near where Carlyle had grown up and connected with our Aussie neighbour. It turns out he had worked with Timo Mayer and the gang too. He’d even operated the tractor while Mayer was making his first plantings on what’s now his famous vineyard.

Meeting him made the Australian trip feel even more serendipitous, and that the lifestyle shift we’re embarking on will forever be linked to a once-in-a-lifetime journey. As chef Anthony Bourdain, that ever-present voice of wanderlust, said of travel: “The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body.”

That first Saturday of planting was cold with lashing rain, yet our support crew stayed in good spirits. Six months later, the vines are thriving, despite a surprise attack by the invasive Japanese beetle. There’s a happy balance here, and we owe some of that to the entrepreneurs, farmers and artists (sorry, Luke) that we met in the Yarra.

ON LOCATION

Pennyweight Winery has an excellent cellar door open to the public, and a member of the Morris family will likely pour you a glass. Mayford Wines isn’t open to the public, but its wines turn up at top restaurants and shops around Australia, including the Barrique Wine Store in Healesville and P&V Merchants in Sydney.

Luke Lambert and Timo Mayer aren’t open to the public either, but their wines are served across the country. Giant Steps just opened a tasting room down the street from Barrique in Healesville.

In Gippsland, Corner Inlet is open to the public by prior arrangement. A lunch at the beautiful Waratah Hills Vineyard is highly recommended, and the wine bar at Dirty Three Wines is also a must.