Widely regarded as producing some of Australia’s best shiraz, Jasper Hill winery and its founders Ron and Elva Laughton are this year celebrating the 25th anniversary of their first vintage.
Their story, over two-and-a-half decades, is one of innovation, passion, adversity and ultimately, success.
A small winery of 25 hectares, Jasper Hill produces about 3000 cases a year. The vineyards were planted in the Heathcote region of Victoria in the mid 1970s with the aim of producing "bloody good shiraz".
If you trail through the accolades the winery has received, that objective has been well and truly achieved. But it hasn’t always been easy and there has been heartache along the way.
The biggest setback came in 1987 when a bushfire wiped out an entire vintage. Jasper Hill famously produced wine that year as the local industry supplied the Laughtons with enough grapes to release a shiraz they labelled ‘Friends’.
Dig below the surface and the Jasper Hill tale is enthralling — in fact talking below the surface about the "living soil" is something Ron Laughton is happy to do.
"Our aim is to make great wine with minimal intervention — to allow the individual vineyard's ‘terroir’ or sense of place to express itself," Ron says.
"I had high ideals of growing good shiraz and as a purist I wanted to do it without irrigation and with the shiraz on their own roots (not grafted onto American rootstock).
"That was my starting criteria, but I also had an underlying desire to not use any chemicals in the vineyard.
"I wanted to make wine as cleanly as possible and if I was able to do so organically my family and I would benefit and my farm would be better off."
As a result, no artificial or synthetic agrochemical herbicides, fungicides, insecticides or fertilisers have ever been applied to the Jasper Hill vineyard.
In 1998 Ron and Elva took the approach a step further by adopting biodynamic principles — including making their own composts and the timely application of them.
"The health and fertility of the vineyard gets back to the healthy life of the soil, which shows in the balance and elegance of the wine," Ron says.
Jasper Hill does not promote the fact that it is an organic/biodynamic winery, however Ron says he knows he has customers who are proud to drink a wine made under a green philosophy.
That philosophy extends to his choice of closure.
"I couldn’t sleep at night knowing that my wine was in contact with the artificial synthetic compound inside a screwcap," he said.
"My wines will easily live for 20 years and I don’t like the idea of that wine being in contact with a synthetic compound acting as the seal.
"From a green perspective, cork is a natural renewable product and the cork oak tree sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — those are positives as far as I’m concerned."
Ron says the fact that he knows how his wines behave under cork is another important factor in his choice of closure.
"To me it is an attribute that we understand that a wine ages gracefully under cork even though we are still admitting that we don’t know why," he said.
Ron is quick to point out that wine taint resulting from the closure is unacceptable at any level, but says he has experienced a very low incidence by purchasing quality corks.
"I’m at the premium end of the market where I can afford to buy the best corks available. You get what you pay for," he said.
"Cork producers have cleaned up their act through research and processing changes and I think we are getting close to the point where we can guarantee to the wine purchaser that the cork will be TCA free.
"I have used Amorim corks exclusively since day one and it has been a good relationship between buyer and supplier over 25 years. I don’t have any great demands on Amorim other than I expect good corks — and they give them to me."
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