Coonawarra, South Australia - Leconfield Wines FULL EPISODE (Cellar Door S06E10)

Hello and welcome to the Cellar Door. I'm George and I am currently in South Australia. Don't be fooled by the quiet here. I am minutes away from the bustling Coonawarra wine region. The crew said that they'd meet me there so I've just got to wait for my train. I'm sure it won't be long. So my train finally arrived and I made it to our destination for today's episode which is very lucky because otherwise I might have missed this beautiful sunny autumnal day and I can't think of anywhere I'd rather be to experience it than right here as a rose amongst the other roses. That's how the saying goes right? I'm here at Leckenfield Coonawarra where I'm going to be sampling some of their delicious wines but I'm also going to help make them. That's right I'm a winemaker now. I've just arrived and I'm catching up with head winemaker at Leckenfield Paul Gordon who decided to kick off our chat with a spot of poetry. So Milonga had a head on it and challenged us to play a single innings match for lunch losing team to pay. We couldn't come to practice we were bringing in our hay but we thought we showed the biggest from Milonga how to play. Now we scoured the flat for miles around to number up our men but when the score was tallied we could only number 10. Then up spoke big Jim Brady. Now he was always slow to speak. He says what price McDougal who lives down Cooper's Creek. So he sent for old McDougal and he stated in reply that he'd never played a cricket but he'd half a mind to try. He couldn't come to practice he was bringing in his hay but he thought he'd show the beggars from Milonga how to play. Now that's it. So good. And that's the show for this week. Thank you so much. It seems that Paul is a man of many talents. Paul thank you so much for having me at Leckenfield Coonawarra. Thanks George it's great to meet you as well. Now you're the head winemaker here. Oh yeah I've been here for 19 years now this is my 20th vintage in Leckenfield. Happy 20th vintage to you. Thank you very much it's been a good one too. It's been great crop this year fantastic quality. It's the type of vintage that a new winemaker would start his first vintage off and think that he was a good winemaker because the grapes are fantastic and the wines almost made themselves this year. But you know better. I know you've got to deal with some tough vintages from time to time. So you started here in let's do some maths 2002? My first vintage was 2002 and I started at the end of 2001. Excellent and what was the winery like back then has it grown a lot since then? It's much the same size as far as buildings and and things are concerned but we've put in some changes to our technology and how we deal with our wines and what we do to try and make to try and keep ourselves abreast with the best quality wines that we can make. But at its essence it is still all about the grape? At its essence it's all about the grape yeah it's our job I think as winemakers is to to preserve that fruit and to to not stuff it not stuff it up in many ways we're trying to try and preserve that fruit to make the best quality wine that actually reflects the region reflects the the individuality of our winery and the techniques that we use to try and make a product that's unique that certainly reflects the environment and the way we grow our grapes. So for you the Coonawarra is a passion? Certainly is yeah I've been here for over over 30 years now and arrived here as a dream in many ways it was a sought-after place to work and Coonawarra was when I first arrived was the area in which everyone wanted to be so I was given the opportunity to move down here and I haven't looked back it's been fantastic it's been a great experience and been involved with some magnificent wines over my time and some of those wines many of those wines now still test still stand the test of time where we open up old ones they look fantastic so that's good. Speaking of wines we've got one here in front of us talk to us a little bit about your cabinet. So this is our Lickingfield Cabernet this is a 2018 vintage Lickingfield Cabernet is probably our most important wine in our range you know we our our quality is probably distilled into this particular product so we this is the pick of the bunch this is this is the one that is probably the most important for maintaining the the brand image and the brand quality you know if we we put a lot of effort into making this wine as best as we possibly can and it's probably the one that most people would recognise when they talk about Lickingfield maybe the one that most people would recognise as being part of the brand. And the Coonawarra region is known for Cab Sav so what is it about yours that sets it apart? I think it's probably primarily the region or the part of the region we're growing so we're living we grow most of our grapes in the southern part of the region and that means it's just a little bit cooler here than maybe the northern part of the region so we pick a little bit later which in my mind gives a little bit more intensity of varietal character and it's that varietal character that we're looking for in wines that now that people pick it up and taste it they can recognise as being a Cabernet Sauvignon and look at the structure of the wines how the lovely tannins we get for this area it's just it's quite quite unique. Should we sample some of this? Absolutely you want me to open it for you? Oh please do. So do you have a soft spot for this wine in particular is there one that that you favour above the others? Not really I think that part of part of our winemaking is that you've got to have a have a passion for everything you do if you certainly we pay we pay a lot of attention to this one but we wouldn't pay any less attention to to Riesling or Chardonnay or our for example because they're also equally important that that they stand in their own rights as being benchmarks in their in in the world of wine. This is 2018 so it's still relatively young it's only only three years old but it's just I love the colour of this wine now that's probably the essence of what Cabernet is about the density and beautiful dark rich dark but also quite youthful as well it's got now lovely crimson on the side still and that's an indication the wine's aging slowly and it's got some time ahead of it. It's got some nice legs too yeah so what are the Coonawarra Cab characteristics that we're looking for in the glass? Okay so you're going to see a little bit of cassis character a little bit of blackberry on the nose and then that's augmented through some maturation in some really really nice oak and we've got some lovely barrels in this room here which you can probably see around you but yeah yeah the essence of any wine I think is the ability to have a glass of it and we should try this soon yeah let us but also then look look forward to it to a second glass of it a second taste now some wines which can be really up front and big and bold you think well it's really lovely and lots of power there but we're looking forward to a second glass of that wine so what we're trying to do is get some elegance and some style into the wines and drinkability indeed cheers It's autumn in Coonawarra and I've decided to go for a walk through the golden tinged vines with Greg Foster, Mackenfield's other winemaker. Greg has over 30 years experience in the wine industry I do too but in a slightly different capacity we're walking through cabernet vines at the moment is that right yep this is one of our cabernet blocks and you've got a special little cabernet baby happening we've uh we actually got a new wine that we've started producing since 2019 called the cabernet so the cabernet is a little bit different um we actually it's a blend of cabernet sauvignon cabernet franc and merlot uh but we actually pick all the three varieties in the vineyard so it's a bit like a vineyard blend if you like oh so you mix them from picking right yeah that's right so we don't sort of blend afterwards or make the or blend the three together after the winemaking process we actually blend them before the winemaking process oh wow and it actually makes quite a different type of wine stylistically it's um probably more cabernet um more aromatic or a lot of the aromatics are coming from the cabernet franc and merlot um and for some reason they tend to uh i guess infuse together during the fermentation process instead of um leaving it for 18 months in barrels and then blending yeah um the wine seems to come together a lot earlier that way and um and hence um the wine is quite approachable on release oh great so um and has really nice subtle tannins um kunawara is quite often renowned for their tannins in their in their grapes particularly cabernet um but using the merlot and the cabernet franc we're we're making a bit more of a textured style of um cabernet if you like okay time to get my hands dirty you are holding a pair of secateurs oh yes i am yep and i like to earn my keep so like can i have a go at sure pruning as the industry lingo goes um well most of our vineyards uh what we normally do for pruning is we'll get a machine going through first and they probably normally just come through and lop off um around so like this height um and then the hand pruners would come through and tidy up and leave um whatever bud numbers we sort of like want so we don't want to leave too many so we don't want to get a big crop and of course we don't want to leave not enough so we don't get enough crop so this is after you've picked yep so yep so so you do you hand pick uh no most most of our fruit is uh machine harvested we do a little bit of hand picking but not much so yep it's all machine harvested but let's do some hand pruning right here so next season um so all this here is this season's growth so um so once a vine's been pruned um once uh spring starts the the shoot will be coming out and it will come out of one of these um shoots here on the side one of these nodes and so all these will be coming out from there shall i do you trust me of course we've got plenty so this one if i'm pruning would i prune down to there or up here probably here because there's one there two there okay on the angle oh i've got a little wraparound it's very elegant all right great well that's that's why it's good to have the tractor go there you go you can get that on get rid of that teamwork one two yep chop oh yeah that's some hard yakka all right i think my work here is done time to knock off and get myself a drink let's thieve some wine right yeah so um this barrel here this is um the cabernet's blend so from 2021 vintage so it's just finished fermenting probably only about a week ago yeah um it is pretty young but um yeah how young only a month old um i'll grab a sample and so this is the co-ferment so all of the grapes going together from the beginning yes that's right so so this particular batch here is a cabernet merlot and cabernet franc blend so again um as we said previously blended in the field so all picked together at the same time crushed together fermented together and pressed together into oak um this particular batch here was actually pressed off around two by may so it finished fermenting in the barrel as well so this isn't this is going to be pretty astringent like pretty fresh it's got young tannins this one particular probably uh we'd like to keep it probably in the barrel for 16 to 18 months so in that time it'll get another racking out of barrel um salt it up go back in and let it mature for those 12 18 months depending on the wine and the year type thing um so yeah it's um but right now it is a bit young um but you'll probably find like um with the cabernet the co-ferments the integration comes really early with the with the wine so uh you tend to make a more softer type of cabernet if you like on the palate it doesn't smell as young as i thought it would no we're very fortunate um the 21 vintage has been a fantastic year i mean i'll say it'll go down as probably one of the best vintages for the last 20 years i think a lot um last year was a very small vintage um this year we got quite a large vintage but the quality is exceptional as well so we've got plenty of wine double win 21 vintage so even though it's a young wine the tannins even though there's a fair lot of tannin there it's actually quite soft it's not mouth puckering or drying no um and it's you know it's only a two months um old wine so yeah uh so this will be hitting the shelves um 2022 uh hopefully yeah yeah great yeah so well into 22 maybe 23 so you've got a bit of time but i'll be waiting leckenfield was purchased in 1981 by one of the original australian winemaking families and today leckenfield and richard hamilton wines share an intertwined history that stretches back to 1837 so sydney hamilton was the fourth generation of his family to be involved in winemaking he would have been 123 this year if he had been still alive but he started off aiming to be a ship's captain but then realized that that wasn't a very good good lifestyle and i think and so ultimately he got involved in the family winemaking business and was one of the first to introduce refrigeration in into winemaking which really popularized in the 40s the making of fruity white styles which probably a bit out of vogue now yeah but really it's a far cry from the elegant cabs but really um at a time when people were drinking fortified wines and some some dry red and beer it really helped put wine onto every on to um every person could have a bottle of slothy off dry white wine which was fruity and fresh and so forth so that's where his his involvement came and he was a very very much an engineer he made a lot of the equipment himself uh welded it in fact the building next door will believe that he he welded some of the some of the trusses that actually go into an original building that's the original building yeah so sydney then basically retired in 1955 but came out of retirement in 1974 in a quest to find the ideal place in australia to grow premium red red wine so he looked around australia tasmania victoria various parts of south australia new south wales but settled on coonawarra as being the place so he bought this property which was which was a sheep farm at the time uh but the interesting thing was at that stage he was 76 when he started this so you can imagine the person coming out of retirement you can imagine some of the family discussions that would have been had about this elderly elderly man granddad's at it again but um i believe that um he was a bit of a character now and everyone who i've met who's met sydney hamilton speak very fondly of him as being a very warm guy very genuine a bit old school um so when he started to plow up the paddocks here to plant vines uh which i understand was it was a sheep farm and when you grow vines in coonawarra underneath the red soil which is very important this area there's a layer of limestone and you need to break that limestone up to get get the vines to penetrate down into to get into the water and the and the that he would had a little bulldozer which he would then drive up and down he was driving he was driving it but not only was he driving it he used to wear a little bow tie and a sports jacket when driving his bulldozer to to work so that in itself is a really good interesting story that's great so sydney um was uh then made the wines here up until he finally retired in 1981 he actually retired fine yes i think under a bit of a pressure from his family and then richard hamilton um bought it off his family and so which is now is the fifth generation looking after it and passing it on to his son thomas hopefully who then carry on the carry on the the wine making family tradition so it's yeah it's a family business yeah it's fantastic and uh and it's great for me i love working for a family environment it's um um you know it's you're intrinsic as part of history to carry it on so my role is not only to make good wines but also to try and make something that is sustainable and going to carry on the future of the family in in years to come and so it's it's a privilege it's a privilege yeah um perhaps i could assist you with some of that and get into the lab or it'd be fantastic yeah we can teach you how to do some some titrations to measure our acidity that's exactly what i was going to ask to do very good fantastic let's go after the break science you're watching the cellar door paul promised me science but i was not expecting this so george what you're doing here is you're going to measure the acidity in our wine and our ph so what we need to do is do a titration so you're going to suck up about 20 exactly 25 mils exactly 25 and so this device yep so keep it down in liquid so it bubbles and you're trying to get it up to about this level of that of that little green mark there okay so it'll be 25 mils and we don't want it to go too far you don't want to go too far no if it goes a little bit too far you can drop some out again afterwards so but if it goes too too far and if it stops going give it another little squeeze that's a little bit more that's it a little bit down a bit up how's that a little bit more that's it looks better okay now take it out and put it over the this little beaker little beaker little beaker here and push it they'd lay same level down not up like that oh yeah so it doesn't run and it'll come down again so there we go so so this is a brand new wine you can see that if wines from for that you that haven't been around for a while they're brilliantly red so as a part of the aging process of wine it will absorb oxygen and as it does so some of the oxygen increases the molecular size of the colouring compounds that make up wine and as those molecules become larger they'll change to more ochre copper colours so you see a change from this brilliantly red in a very young wine to more ochre colours and brown wine as the wine ages so i thought that was from oak no it's a it's a it's a bit of oxidation a molecular change okay so i've got my little beaker exactly 20 to the pH meter oh okay i feel like i should have a lab coat on and what you're going to do now is lower this thing down using that little red finger squeeze it there and lower it down just making sure that there goes into the thing yeah and making sure that glass one here doesn't touch anything but that's very fragile oh god the pressure yeah here we go okay all the way down all the way down that's right oh that's terrifying and it's starting to spin now that's that's spinning it's just spinning it now you're going to work on the control panel and now i'm a winemaker and now you're a winemaker so what we're doing is just just measuring both the the pH of the wine and the acidity level of the wine aren't pH and acidity the same thing they're so um so pH is um but it's not not exactly the same so pH is a um you can have a wine which has got reasonably high um it's a high acidity and it would normally have a have a lower pH but sometimes you can get the wine that's not quite in balance so sometimes it's um it can be high pH and it's a high acid so you want a low pH and a high acid well you want to want to have it so it's so it's so it tastes good basically um so pH if it gets too low um it can increase the the um the filling of acidity and increase the amount of hardness in the palate so we're looking at a combination in of having enough acid so it's sort of nice and the wine's nice and bright but um not so acid that it becomes hard and unpalatable so looking for mouthfeel and texture and all those things are really important so this thing will titrate to an endpoint of 8.2 pH which is in calibrated then to read the amount of acidity in the wine measured as tartaric acid exactly okay okay so as as the pH of the wine increases it changes from red color into greens and zephyrines in this type of color yeah so it's oh so just refilling now here come the results okay and so it'll tell you that the acidity level that pick the wine is 7.01 grams per litre right okay and if you just push that enter button again yep it'll tell you that the patch was 3.67 amazing that's it perfect well now that that's done i thought i'd catch up with kerry in leckenfield's brand new cellar door kerry you are the cellar door manager here at leckenfield coonawarra that's right and you have been for a little while i believe just turned my 13th year and so in my 14th now yes excellent and things have changed a little bit yes we've built a new cellar door this beautiful new cellar door and the owners have been talking about for a long time whether to invest and build a new cellar door from the old one and they said they'd do it and took about 12 months to build it when it was finished and then covid hit so it was it took 12 months to build the new one and it's quite a lot bigger than your old one i believe a lot bigger yes about the little old one used to be about a fifth the size of this so it's got heated floors of fire air conditioning and yeah it's just lovely it's a really nice place to work in and the customers love it they think it's just lovely and there's a beautiful outlook too a lovely outlook facing north yes and all the beautiful roses and they grow really well down here before we were facing south so everything was in the shade etc but now it's looks really nice lovely sunny outlook lovely sunny outlook yeah i know that the winery was founded by sydney hamilton where does the name leckenfield come from leckenfield comes from english ancestry lord leckenfield yes so a regal name yeah very regal and but that's where the name came from so yeah kunawa is not really known for white wine we're famous for red wine in particular cabernet but we make some fantastic whites down here yeah this is delicious it's lovely isn't it it ages really well as well yeah what oh this is 2019 yes you do offer a few little we do we offer and we've got a produce fridge so people can choose whatever they like out the fridge and we basically put it on a board and give it to them they do the rest so it works really well for us so which is great oh maybe i could try a little of course i've got one made up over here oh here's one you prepared earlier and is it all local it's all south australian produce perry thank you so much for having me no worries at all it was lovely my pleasure cheers thank you well i have had a lovely day here at leckenfield kunawara i've tasted some amazing wines i've learnt a thing or two and now it's time for me to relax with some snacks a wine and this fire i'll see you next time