Finding alternatives to common wine varieties that are better suited to Australian conditions could be vital to the industry’s future.
By Jeni Port, inside the December Issue of Winning Magazine.
At 8.30am midweek in early November, Mark Walpole is on the road heading to Mildura. It’s a much-anticipated annual adventure for the Beechworth vigneron. One of his great passions, alternative grape varieties, will be celebrated during the judging and public tastings at the Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show. The wine show is where the unpronounceable mixes with the obscure, the challenging with the experimental.
A celebration of grape varieties that could very well beat the effects of a changing climate, and those that might fail but will be planted nonetheless, because it’s worth a shot.
Giving it a shot — digging up soils and planting grapes just to see what they might do — has been something Walpole has been willing to do for nearly 40 years. Sometimes, they do extraordinarily well. The Spanish (tempranillo), Portuguese (touriga nacional), Austrians (grüner veltliner) and Georgians (saperavi) have all done well, but none have been accepted quite as enthusiastically as the Italians. Anecdotally, Australia is believed to grow the most hectares of Italian grape varieties outside Italy. Sun-loving sangiovese is the most planted Italian red; pinot grigio and ever-bubbly prosecco the dominant Italian whites. “To me, it’s all about giving people choice rather than being stuck with four or five varieties,” Walpole says. “I guess the more choice the consumer has, the better. It’s also really about having these choices of varieties to suit your [vineyard] site, what you are dealing with, where you are.”
Walpole’s passion — some might say his obsession — began innocently enough with walnuts rather than grapes. For generations, his family has owned land in the high country around Whorouly South in Victoria’s appropriately named Alpine Valleys. Fresh out of agricultural college back in 1985, Walpole started importing new varieties of walnut trees from Oregon in the United States. His reasoning was simple: the new varieties were better. “I thought, this seems crazy, you’re investing in a tree that is going to be there for 50 years, and [why would] you plant something that is going to be outclassed? “I guess my interest in doing things differently, thinking long-term, started probably then.” Two years later he was working as a viticulturist for leading Australian wine producer Brown Brothers at its Milawa headquarters in Victoria’s North East. “As soon as you start working at Browns you work in an environment which is thinking completely outside the square. You just think very, very differently,” he says. Brown Brothers had a strong new product development group which envisaged new grape varieties and new places to plant them, such as the King Valley. Walpole was up for the challenge, and, with the assistance of nurseryman Bruce Chalmers, started importing Italian grapes such as sagrantino, aglianico, sangiovese and more.
Above: Fighting Gully Road vineyard, approximately 580m above sea level, looking south towards the escarpment.
In 1995, while continuing to work for Brown Brothers, Walpole purchased land on a high escarpment outside the Beechworth township to establish his own vineyard, Fighting Gully Road. Initially planting cabernet, merlot and pinot noir grapes, he later changed the focus to tempranillo, shiraz and sangiovese. He also, for a short time, invested in a new Heathcote vineyard, Greenstone, with his friend the leading Italian wine consultant Antonio Antonini. Shiraz played a big part, but also new clones of sangiovese and colorino. Sangiovese has been a constant over the decades, a grape and wine that both challenges and excites Walpole. It is a feature grape of his family vineyard.
Alternative grape varieties often speak a different language to the classic French varieties which have dominated Australian plantings from the beginnings of the local wine industry. Walpole is an intelligent interpreter of that language, of both the grape’s needs and of the environment in which it’s planted. A vine whisperer, you might say. He’s also highly intuitive when it comes to turning those grapes into wine. Walpole left Brown Brothers in 2007 to concentrate on Fighting Gully Road and come to terms with Beechworth’s specific needs and strengths. In particular, chardonnay, the region’s strong suit, followed by pinot noir and a host of alternatives such as tempranillo and sangiovese.
With its Mediterranean-like warm sites and higher, cooler-altitude locations, Beechworth offers plenty of scope for a vigneron with an active mind who likes to explore all possibilities. Walpole recently grafted grenache, a warm weather specialist, onto his cool climate-loving pinot noir vines. However, it’s the region’s cooler sites — specifically at Stanley, near Beechworth — which now occupy most of his interest. “If you are in a warm area, you have a plethora of varieties you can now choose from,” he says. “But if you are in a pretty cool area and you want to plant cooler varieties, what choice do you have?” Walpole’s answer to the question is petite arvine and cornalin, both new to Australia. Petite arvine, a white grape, calls Switzerland home and is also grown in Italy’s Valle d’Aosta. “The wine is somewhere between chardonnay and pinot gris aromatically and texturally,” suggests Walpole. Cornalin, a red grape, is also Swiss and also grown in the d’Aosta region. “It produces plush wines for early release,” says Walpole, “which seems to be where the market is heading at the moment.”Walpole first encountered petite arvine some 10 years ago when he was on his way to inspect nebbiolo grapes in the d’Aosta. The meeting led to a long-running series of stops and starts to bring the grape to Australia. The vines are now in the ground at Stanley. “Petite arvine, I believe, will give vignerons in the cooler parts of mainland Australia and Tasmania a real alternative white variety in time,” he says.
The work that has dominated much of Walpole’s career proves that sourcing alternative grapes is not just about varieties suited to a hotter, drier climate. Now, alternative varieties are also possible for sites which historically have been considered too cold to even take a vine. It’s an exciting new world that Walpole is ready to explore. Ends.
POSTSCRIPT: At the 2024 Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show in November, Fighting Gully Road’s 2023 Verdicchio — made from the white verdicchio grape, traditionally grown in central Italy — picked up the Chief of Judges’ Wine to Watch Award.
The above article appears in the December Issue of Winning Magazine. Written and approved for reproduction by Jeni Port.