In the lee of the craig.

THE DOGS ROVED by night. They poured over the rocky hills of Sunbury in southern Victoria, driving at sheep and slaughtering by the dozen. One night they got a sniff of a flock and chased it through the grass-splashed blackness, hoaring and gnawing and mincing at their heels, barking at the bleating, herding, terrifying, driving the sheep as a group. The night turned blacker, the land rose, the barking and bleating and bullocking reached the kind of windy pitch that makes people peer out from behind curtains. There was trouble that black night on the Carmody farm at Sunbury; the farm known as Craiglee.

It was the early 1970s. It was in the late, tired, mad stretch of night. The dogs charged and the sheep fled and in the morning in the lee of the craig it was a bloody horror, an incredible 150 sheep dead on the Carmody farm, the bulk of them rammed and herded and run straight off a cliff edge.

That night ‘destroyed my father’, winemaker Pat Carmody now says. That night was the reason Pat Carmody got to thinking that the family needed to farm something different, something that couldn’t be destroyed by beasts in the night or, in Pat’s words, ‘something that couldn’t be eaten’. In 1976 then, shiraz vines were planted on the family farm on the Tullamarine Airport side of the Sunbury township. It was an historic decision, on an historic site: a century before there’d been a vineyard on that very patch of land, and that vineyard had produced wines that, it turned out, lived a healthy life of a hundred years plus.

As land goes then, the Craiglee farm had breeding. Thirty years later, the Craiglee breeding seems truer than ever; the rejuvenated Craiglee vineyard now produces one of Australia’s finest wines. Pat Carmody, modestly, attributes Craiglee’s success ‘not to the yield, and not to the age of the vines. I think that it all comes down to the quality of the site’.

Not that Pat Carmody’s father wanted to have a bar of planting a vineyard when it was first suggested back in the 1970s, by (the late) John Brown of Brown Brothers. John Brown had been there the night that the 100-odd year old wine had been opened, and had been so taken by the wine that he’d driven out to Sunbury to visit. ‘When John suggested that, my father thought it was a fair bit of nonsense,’ Pat now says. ‘But John was pretty keen: he reckoned that any vineyard that could produce a wine that drank well after a hundred years in the cellar had to have something about it.’

The Craiglee wine that started the modern renaissance came from 1872. Craiglee back then was run by a member of Victorian Parliament. Bottles of this wine survived because it had won an award at an exhibition in Vienna in 1875, and because of that win its proud-as-
punch maker (the Johnston family) kept bottles of it aside. These bottles were kept, undisturbed, in the dark, in frigid conditions, in the property’s bluestone Sunbury cellar. These set-aside bottles were uncovered in the early 1950s – prior to the Carmody’s ownership of the property – and certainly well before the vineyard was replanted (in 1976). A good number of bottles of it were opened in the 1960s and again in 1972, to mark its centenary. To everyone’s amazement, the wine was not just still good, but was beautiful.

Or, indeed, better than that. Some Australian wine industry people lucky enough to have drunk of it still, today, reckon that it was the most magnificent Australian wine they’ve ever encountered.

The romance of it.

At one showing of the wine, in the early 1970s, a Dr Simon Borten described this forgotten-then-found wine with these eloquent words: ‘A rich, glowing wine with all oenological faculties unimpaired and a mouthful of bouquet to every sip. (It) has lost nothing by age, it was at its best, a wonderful claret, there are few wines of this century that can equal its magnificent flavour, gentle richness and mellowness. No wine could have been more enjoyable.’

This of course is some praise for a 100-year-old wine, which is why the details of this wine are now part of Australian wine folklore. What is less well known is that the wine in question, which drank well at 100 years of age, was made off tender young vines producing only their third crop. To boot, the wine had an alcohol content of around 11.5 per cent.

There is a theory that wines made from young grapevines cannot age long term. Another is that wines at low alcohol lack charm and flavour. This old Craiglee wine ruffles both theories.

More importantly, what this historic wine has done to Craiglee – and to Pat Carmody specifically – is give the estate a clear wine goal, and a goal that (critically) relates solely to the exact piece of land that he farms.

Everything Pat Carmody does is an attempt to tease out the kind of qualities that the land produced a century ago. As Pat puts it, ‘I’ve always worked with the monkey on my back. Can I produce a wine that will live for 100 years?’

(Or more specifically, for 120 years: the one and only chance Carmody has had to taste the 1872 Craiglee shiraz was at a dinner organised by writer Andrew Wood*, in 1992. There’s an interesting story here too: when Pat saw the wine for sale at auction he planned to bid on it, but just before the auction his tractor blew up and he didn’t have the time or money to go chasing wine. Wood bought it – and then invited Carmody over for dinner and a drink.)

This partly explains why, when people rave over Craiglee’s warm-year 1997 and 2000 shiraz releases, Carmody is pleased but quietly circumspect. Personally, he prefers the cooler years, the finer years, the spicier years (Carmody can tell you which grapes, in which position on which vine, will carry spice flavours, and which grapes – before he’s even tasted them – will have all the spice blown off). In short, he’s keener on the releases that more reflect that historic 1872 vintage release.

I may not share his exact taste – the 1997 Craiglee shiraz, from a warm year, served at an international shiraz extravaganza in 2004, stole the show with its ripe, spice-shot elegance – you can’t help but recognise that Carmody’s taste is the key to understanding and appreciating Craiglee. Carmody’s taste has depth, breadth and history. Egging this along is the fact that Carmody also believes that moderate years, rather than warm-to-hot years, have a tendency to live longer.

Not that Carmody, of late, has had too many of his preferred kind of years to play with, courtesy of the 1997-2007 drought. ‘People talk about dry-grown vineyards,’ Carmody says, ‘but after ten years without proper rainfall, the de-vigoration in the vineyard here is scary. We’re down to half a tonne per acre with our shiraz, which creates all sorts of viability issues.’

‘It’s important,” Carmody moves on, “that you don’t get too precious about your position (in Australian wine). It’s very easy to become, or to be seen as, part of the furniture. You don’t want to be in people’s faces all the time, but it’s sometimes hard to keep people interested.

“It’s interesting for me to see the (winery) names who get the attention, and the areas that do: I look at the land here and know that this area has grown fruit for a long time, which means that it’s a sustainable area. I’m not yet sure if some of these other (wine) areas are. I don’t know if they are, is the honest answer, I don’t know. I just work on the basis that if your wines are good enough then they’ll make a name for themselves, and if they’re not then you’ll fade away.’

I say to Carmody, then, that when I spoke to him nearly two years prior, he’d talked against the idea of Craiglee creating a reserve wine. His reasoning was simple: he didn’t like robbing Peter to pay Paul. In the meantime the wine world around him had moved progressively towards more exclusive parcels of grapes being kept separate in the winery and then bottled distinct. We’ve moved beyond reserve wines to single vineyard wines. We’ll soon move to small-sections-of- a-vineyard wines. It’s part of a keen drive within boutique Australian wine circles to showcase the best or most distinctive wine expressions the land can produce. It’s part, in broader terms, of Australian wine’s move away from a democratic ideal, and towards the niche elite.

‘When we planted shiraz in the 1970s,’ Carmody says, ‘shiraz was unfashionable, so we don’t mind if what we do is unfashionable. But look, in ten years’ time, I don’t know what we’ll be selling. I like the way we’ve got things now. It’s a simple message. And besides, I don’t want to be so presumptuous as to pull out a barrel and sell it at a higher price. If I think it’s good, I want to put it in with the others. But who knows?’

Who knows. The Craiglee winery exists because of a wine that remained true and beautiful for over 100 years, and for this truth and beauty it became a legend. The Craiglee winery exists, too, because of a night, a dark night, roved by dogs, when the farm’s 150 sheep were run straight off the edge of a cliff. As histories go, the Craiglee one is dark, deep, vivid and magical. It’s from this darkness, and this depth, and the vividness of this magic that the Craiglee wines do rise. We drink them, in or outside the lee of the craig, and know both in our hearts and in the cold centre of our bones, that truth and beauty are near.

——

[I don’t know the exact date that this article was first published, but it was probably around 2005. It won the $10,000 Australian Wine Communicator Award in the year that it was entered, as judged by (the late) Len Evans. Minor edits and amendments have since been made.]

* Andrew Wood was the publisher of Divine Magazine, and the farmer at Glenora Heritage Produce.

There are currently 26 reviews of Craiglee Shiraz, across multiple vintages, on The Winefront site.

** For a great depiction of the Craiglee Winery landscape – and how sheep could have been run off a cliff – see the open few seconds of the drone video on the Craiglee Vineyards homepage.

Campbell Mattinson writes for The Winefront.