ATTWOODS

Macedon and Ballarat

attwoodswines.com.au

This tiny producer, led by a Burgundy-trained ex-sommelier, has produced some of Victoria’s most distinctive and tensile Pinot Noir and Chardonnay ever since Troy and Jane Walsh laid down roots in the cool reaches of Scotsburn and the Macedon Ranges. With the inaugural release of its striking Pinot from the daring, close-planted Mon Climat vineyard, Attwoods now feels to have reached a kind of simmering completeness.

“We’re the only people who came to Ballarat for the climate,” quips Troy Walsh. There are easier ways to grow Pinot Noir than planting 10,000 vines to the hectare on a cold, quartz-strewn hill outside Ballarat.

Troy Walsh knows this. He planted them anyway.

At Attwoods, the little Victorian winery Walsh founded with his wife Jane, inconvenience seems almost to be part of the plan. The vineyards are cold. Frost is a constant threat. The vines at their Mon Climat site are planted so close together, and trained so low, that pruning can mean crawling along the rows on hands and knees. Mechanisation is largely out of the question.

Which raises the obvious question: why here? Because Walsh reckons great Pinot Noir and Chardonnay rarely come from easy places.

Attwoods began in 2010, when Troy and Jane bought a property south-west of Ballarat after years spent developing an idea of the sort of wine they wanted to make. Early releases came from purchased Pinot and Chardonnay before they took over management of the beautiful Glenlyon Estate on the outskirts of the Macedon Ranges, in 2019.

The roots of the project, though, stretch back to London and Burgundy. Walsh spent twelve years working as a sommelier in top-notch London restaurants before gravitating to Burgundy, where he worked with Olivier Leriche and Jacques Devauges at Domaine de L’Arlot and Domaine David Duband. Serious hombres. What followed him home was not a desire to make imitation Burgundy, but an attraction to its underlying ideals: healthy soils, restrained winemaking and, above all, wines that taste of somewhere rather than merely of winemaking technique.

That helps explain Mon Climat.

Sitting around 500 metres above sea level at Scotsburn, near Ballarat, the tiny vineyard is planted into ancient, quartz-rich Ordovician soils. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grow at 10,000 vines per hectare—properly dense by Australian standards—with rows just 1.2 metres apart. The theory is that forcing vines to compete with each other limits vigour and produces tiny bunches (in the region of just 400 grams as it goes) and berries with unusually concentrated flavour.

The reality is considerably less romantic.

Everything here is geared towards quality rather than convenience. The vineyard is brutally labour-intensive. Walsh describes it as the hardest site they have worked. Low wires and narrow rows make machinery impractical, while Ballarat’s weather provides the additional amusement of bitter winds and damaging spring frost. On one particularly unpleasant pruning day, conditions fell to a wind-chill temperature of around minus four.

But marginality is precisely the attraction. Ballarat can have warm days followed by very cold nights, slowing ripening and helping the grapes retain acidity. For Walsh, that tension is crucial. He wants Pinot with perfume and intensity, certainly, but also savouriness, fine tannin and enough freshness to sit happily beside food rather than flatten it.

A similar, old-world ethos follows the fruit into the winery. Attwoods talks about leaving the “lightest thumbprint” possible: wild fermentation, gentle extraction and significant whole-bunch use, with comparable winemaking across vineyards so differences between sites are not disguised by technique. The premium wines are deliberately structured and built to develop rather than engineered for maximum fruitiness on release.

And beneath all this is an increasingly serious farming program. Cover crops, compost teas, mulch, worm counts and beneficial insects are used to encourage healthier soils; herbicides and pesticides are avoided. Winery marc is composted with material from the farm and returned to the property—the beginnings of the closed agricultural loop Walsh wants to create.

Attwoods remains tiny, deliberately so. There is no obvious ambition to turn the place into a large wine business. Instead, there is that cold hill, those absurdly close rows and a lot of hard work. Which, for Attwoods, appears to be exactly the point.