SUMMARY:
Brokenwood has been a Five Star producer for several decades and yet still it is often under appreciated. In any given year it can and does produce both outstanding white and red wines, principally from its home Hunter Valley region but also from Margaret River, McLaren Vale and Beechworth. It makes wines of general appeal but it has always gone for gold as a champion of single vineyards. The Brokenwood Graveyard Vineyard Shiraz 2022 is an excellent case in point. A cool, wet year has produced a wine of restraint, balance and grace, but with no shortage of class. This wine does not see any new oak. It’s a wine characterised, as all the world’s best wines are, by its length; it has that extra rock to the general roll of flavour. It is, as I said in my Winefront review, a pretty special wine.

Full Winefront review and score at: Brokenwood Graveyard Vineyard Shiraz 2022

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STORY: From the Graveyard to the Cradle

The night before my daughter was born, in July 2002, I went to a tasting of Graveyard Shiraz. I remember this because my wife went into labour as I was getting ready to leave. The tasting was held to launch the 2000 vintage of Graveyard Shiraz, and because Brokenwood was so confident of the quality of this release, it had organised a Graveyard Versus The World style of tasting, over dinner, at The Prince Hotel in Melbourne. This dinner would feature big name shiraz from around the globe, as well as both the latest Graveyard Shiraz and back vintages, as well indeed as back vintages of Penfolds Grange. Brokenwood Graveyard Shiraz is the only red wine from the Hunter Valley on the top rung of the Langton’s Classification of Australian Wine. As soon as I heard that my wife had gone into labour, it was obvious that I’d have to miss this tasting. This as I say was 2002, before streaming services; you couldn’t pick and choose when you watched things back then. The back vintage of Grange in the tasting was, though, the 1986; one of the best vintages of Penfolds Grange ever. They were saying then that the 2000 Graveyard might be the best ever vintage of Graveyard too.

When I say that my wife had gone into labour, I should point out that she was 39 weeks pregnant at the time. That is, she was a week overdue.

Anyway, it was raining, I remember, as I headed out to the tasting. I remember thinking how apt it was that it was a tasting of Graveyard, because if I lost this gamble, and missed my daughter’s birth, then I would indeed need a graveyard of my own, because I’d be a dead man. I say this not because my wife is vindicative, or would hold it against me, because she’s not, and she wouldn’t. But I’d be a dead man in my own eyes, so much self respect would I lose.

Just before I left, I’d re-looked at the invitation to the event. I told myself that I was looking for a contact phone number to call in my cancellation. On the invitation were details of the wines that would be tasted. There was a 1986 Henschke Hill of Grace too. And a 1991 Wendouree.

‘How far apart are your contractions?’ I heard myself ask my wife.

‘Eight minutes,’ my wife replied. And then she added, ‘You can probably still go.’

A 1991 Eileen Hardy. A 1994 Guigal Brune et Blonde. A 1994 Wynns Michael.

‘It’s out of the question,’ I said.

‘I’m probably still hours away,’ she said.

A couple of years before this, the chief winemaker at Peter Lehmann Wines at the time, the much-loved Andrew Wigan, told me that all three of his kids were born in the car, or at least not in a hospital, because each time the babies had come so quick that they’d never quite made it there in time. I chose this moment with my wife, as she stared at the clock to see if there was any time-change in the rate of her contractions, to tell her this story. I then added, ‘The Barossa’s not a very big place either.’

I also knew that Stuart Bourne, who was the winemaker at Barossa Valley Estate at the time, never even made it out of the house, so fast had his partner given birth.

‘Take your mobile,’ my wife said. ‘I’ll probably be right.’

I looked for the number again, so that I could cancel. There was a 1998 Jaboulet La Chapelle on the list too.

I’d noticed, of course, that my wife kept using the word probably. Even so, I asked, ‘You think I should go?’

‘I’ll hold on,’ she said.

‘It would feel very odd,’ I said, ‘to just go to a wine tasting while you are in labour.’

‘I’ll hold on till morning,’ she said.

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Earlier this year I sat down to a tasting of top-class shiraz at, by pure co-incidence, the same Prince Hotel. Twenty-two years had passed since the night of the above events. The wines that I was tasting this time were served blind, which means that as I tasted each wine I didn’t know what it was. But I had been involved in the organisation of this tasting and so I knew what all the possibilities were. I knew that there was a Brokenwood Graveyard Shiraz among them, and I knew that it was the 2022. I worked my way through the wines and then reached a wine that smelled of the Hunter Valley. It was a cool wine, possibly a bit reductive, not at all in-your-face, perhaps even a bit reticent, though its quality was clear. I leant away from my laptop and took the wine in properly, not writing anything, just taking it in. I looked around the room. It was full of other wine tasters, most of whom I’d known for 20-odd years, or for about as long as I’ve now known my daughter. It was only then, in that moment, as I looked at the faces of these people that I’d grown older with for the past two decades, sipping as I was at this Graveyard Shiraz, that I drew the somewhat spooky connection between this venue, and this wine, and this kind of tasting. I sat there then, remembering that cold, wet night in 2002 when I was so desperate to be a part of the world of wine that I’d risked missing the birth of my daughter. It was only then, I think, that I realised, as in deep down and properly, how incredibly and profoundly stupid I’d been to take that risk.

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I don’t go to the Hunter Valley very often. But I was in the Hunter Valley in February 2022, which is when the grapes for the Brokenwood Graveyard Shiraz 2022 were picked. It was soaking wet in the Hunter Valley while I was there, and the wonder in the air was whether this was it, the end of vintage, or whether the clouds would part and it would clear up again. On the ground it looked more like a semillon year than a shiraz year. I remember the exact date of this visit to the Hunter Valley because while I was there I received a phone call, informing me that my daughter had been in a car accident. She was ok, but that phone call changed me and the life of our family.

You follow some wines. And some wines follow you.

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I wrote an article, in 2002, about the Graveyard Versus The World event, and how it had taken place while my wife was in labour. I titled this article From The Cradle to the Graveyard, which sounded good but was wrong; it should have been the other way around. In this article I outlined the making of Brokenwood Graveyard Vineyard Shiraz 2000. It was a quote from a press release of the time. ‘(The grapes were) hand-picked perfectly ripe at just over 14 degrees Baumé, with excellent acidity and in perfect condition. The 12 acre vineyard was in great balance, with a yield of 1.75 tonne per acre. After a four day cold soak, the wine underwent a warm, five day fermentation in open 2-tonne fermenters, before being transferred to 80% new oak (70% French, 30% American) for a period of 18 months.’ I quote this here because the new Brokenwood Graveyard Vineyard Shiraz 2022 is made – by Stuart Hordern and his team – similarly, but is raised different. None of us are ever exactly the same river. The 2022 Graveyard spent time in 100% French oak, but none of this oak was new.

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When my daughter was born, I was an avid reader. Around that time I read a book called Cry of The Damaged Man. I remember a few things about this book but mostly I remember one single line from it, which runs through my head all the time. ‘Time is never wasted, even when it’s wasted.’ Over the years this line has morphed quite radically into something new, in my head. When I think on this line now I often say it to myself as, You never get away with anything, even when you get away with it.

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In 2006 I visited Brokenwood and then rushed, between a tasting and dinner, back to my hotel and wrote this about the Graveyard Vineyard:

The guts of the shiraz part of the vineyard was planted in the energetic summer of 1968, but in 1992 the cabernet and the merlot part of it was ripped out and the best clonal shiraz money could buy was sunk down into the red clay volcanic crumbling ironstone dirt. The push, then, was to finally produce decent quantities of Graveyard Vineyard Shiraz.

But this planting didn’t work. The old green vines kept working but not the new modern ones. And not just for a season – for over a decade. The new shiraz, the clones, were a disaster of mediocrity. The years 1992 to 2005 were spent in a long slow persistent wait that ended with bulldozers. Not a single grape of the 'new' vines ever made it into Graveyard. And so they started again, with new new vines going into the ground. Added to the old vines. This time they did not plant clones, but instead planted cuttings from old mother vines – from the oldest shiraz vines on the Graveyard block and also from Kay’s historic Block 6 in McLaren Vale and from the 1972 plantings at Seville Estate in the Yarra Valley.

And so then this is where we are now. With a wine from a Graveyard vineyard that is now stronger than ever, courtesy of cuttings from the vineyard’s mothers.

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Over the years Brokenwood Graveyard Vineyard Shiraz has moved closer to its roots. It’s no longer a thick-ish wine with thick-ish oak on top, or it’s not if the new 2022 release is anything to go by. You could say that it’s become more Hunter than ever, and more expressive of its home. There’s something immeasurably child-like and innocent, and therefore magnetic, about terroir when it’s expressed in pure terms. Nothing cuts deeper than a truth told in a child’s voice. There are something like 30 vintages of Graveyard Vineyard Shiraz reviewed on The Winefront, though of the past several releases we’ve missed a few. We’ll catch up one day. The Brokenwood website suggests that this 2022 is the 33rd release from this vineyard. Back in 2006 I wrote this of Brokenwood: ‘It’s part of Brokenwood history that three separate tractors were bogged in one vineyard in one afternoon. There are photographs of folks picking grapes with their feet sunk shin-deep in mud.’ If it’s not wet in the Hunter Valley it’s hot. Or it’s both hot and wet. The Hunter Valley is of course the cradle of Australian wine. I drank my first ever Graveyard shiraz on the night before my daughter was born. I drank the most recent 2022 Graveyard Shiraz in my last public duty as editor of the Halliday guide. James Halliday once part-owned Brokenwood, and helped plant its first vines. Sometimes it feels, when I swirl a glass of Graveyard Shiraz, that I don’t just swirl a wine; I swirl a universe.

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30-odd Winefront reviews of Brokenwood Graveyard Vineyard Shiraz.