Wine with altitude: Tessa Brown from Vignerons Schmölzer & Brown

I'm joined today by winemaker Tessa Brown. We're going to talk about her journey from a sugarcane farm to establishing boutique Beechworth label vineyard on Schmaltzer and Brown, making wine at altitude and more. Welcome Tessa, thank you so much for joining me. No, it's good to be here. You grew up on a sugarcane farm in Queensland, right? Yep, I sure did. When did you decide you wanted to be a winemaker? I watched my parents do not as well as they possibly wanted to as sugar farmers. Long story short, Brazil did a practice called sugar dumping through the late 90s where they stockpile a lot of product and then they can release it onto the market and artificially change the cost of production. They had some poor seasons and their income was affected by that. I watched them struggling with commodity pricing, but dad had always been a wine drinker. When I was in senior school, I knew I liked science, I knew I liked plants, and we visited a cellar door when I visited my sister at Wagga where she was working. I got the sense just from a humble cellar door in Rutherglen, okay, they grow the grapes and they make the product. Then if they connect with the consumer, they can sell it at the price that they deem it worth. I just had this sense, okay, you can do agriculture and not have your outcome defined by someone 15,000 kilometres away. I just like, ting, ah, and that just made sense to me. That's why I applied to do viticulture when I was 17, not actually knowing the difference between viticulture and oenology at the time. You're like, this is wine related? Yeah. Same, same. Okay, so you studied viticulture. What was your journey, I guess, from when you made that call that that was going to be your future to then establishing a vineyard on Schmotzer and Brown in Beechworth? I got lucky. I just really enjoyed it. I think having that background of loving plants, it was a sensible decision to do viticulture. Back then, viticulture and oenology wasn't a combined course, which I think it mostly is today at Adelaide and Charles Sturt. They kicked you out at the end of second year and told you to finish your last year externally, and I just started working. It was the end of that, getting to the end of that 90s boom, terrible policy in investor vineyards, but certainly gave a lot of us work in the mid to late 90s. I worked on vineyards for several years in Orange and Canberra, and then I'd always wanted to do both vineyard and winery, so I signed up for a vintage in Canberra in 2003, that marvelous smoke-affected season, and then just started slotting winery vintages with vineyard work, and then went back to university at Adelaide and did a grad dip, and then eventually shifted into winemaking and worked around in a few places. At the point at which I met Jeremy and explained to him what I was about and what I wanted to do, he's like, yeah, that sounds cool as hell. We just had the concept of doing our own thing off in the one day, but circumstances conspired toward it in the end, and we bought the block of land in 2012 in Beechworth and moved up and started working on it in 2013. So just little steps over a long time, I suppose, is probably the best way. How did you and Jeremy meet? What's your love story? Yeah, it's pretty... shame. Do you know a cool and not at all trashy venue in Fed Square called Transport? No way. Yeah, literally struck up a conversation with each other in Transport in 2007. 20, what is it? No, 18 years later. Yeah, wow. I'm curious to know, how involved he is, I guess, in the day-to-day in terms of winemaking and all of those other sorts of things? Can he fully make wine now he's learned on the job, all those things, or does he take care of other parts of the business? We've got our areas of expertise. He's vastly better at logistics and fitting together complex things in a way where work flows sensibly, which makes sense as an architect, because you've got to coordinate this trade and that trade, and that comes before this and things like that. I'm probably better at pulling apart something that's broken and getting it fixed. I would say I'm probably more practical and a bit rough. He's probably rather more detail-oriented and precise, and those things, they mesh in together reasonably well. But all the decision-making happens together during harvest. He typically goes out and coordinates picks, and I typically do receival and keep the winery ticking over, and then there's the juggle of the kids in amongst that as well. We work it out day-to-day, but we definitely have different strengths that get lent on in that regard. You just mentioned you bought your property in Beechworth, or in Stanley, just outside of Beechworth in 2012. That was on advice of Mark Walpole, wasn't it, from Fighting Glee Road? We owe it all to Mark. We wouldn't be in Beechworth if it weren't for Mark. It would have just been a concept or a dream. We used to make wine at Koo Yung Contract Winemaking for a brand called Greenstone, which has since been bought and sold. But Mark was a partner in it at that time, and we got to know Mark and let him know about our interest in maybe one day going it alone. He's like, you should come up to Beechworth. I'll show you a few paddocks that I think have potential. He was the best pusher man ever. He just took us around maybe in 2009, perhaps. Took us for a drive around and said, oh, this paddock should be good for this. That paddock has great air drainage. This is a good site, but that guy's a bit weird. The site that we ended up lucky enough to purchase was the last site that he showed us on our drive around. He said, I've had my eye on this block for many years. I've tried to get Browns to buy it, but they passed on it because, obviously, Browns being mostly mechanised, they couldn't have long enough vineyard rows. Then I think he tried to get Kevin McCarthy to look at it, but they were fairly well settled on the peninsula. We just kept an eye on the real estate market just from time to time. Then in early 2012, Jeremy called me into the computer and he said, is this the one? I'm like, you're joking. We had to jump. What's so special about it? Because I think I read that he'd said, Mark had said it was like the jewel in the crown of the Beechworth GI. Yeah. He has said that before about other places as well. He said that about- But he meant it this time. Yeah. No, he said it about it at the site at Colborne Abbey where they planted greenstone as well. It is a bloody good site though. It's got lovely slope, but not too much that driving a tractor is dangerous or difficult. Dangerous or difficult, we leave to the wombats that dig the holes under the rows. I think what's most awesome about our site is it's soul again. It's still something I'm learning because the easiest way to explain it is that we're getting brown pips in our grapes at a potential alcohol of 11 to 11.5. Now, I've worked in vineyards, since the late 90s. Typically, the seed of a grape, which looks like a little pear, its tip and its base starts to go a bit tan within a week or so of ripening, but often that's 13 or 14, particularly in reds. I've never seen that aspect of physiological ripening at such a low bome. Now, since we've been doing it, you see things on the internet with other growers in other parts of the world where they're seeing it in their own sites. A slight preponderance towards higher altitude sites, but not only that. Dylan Grigg did an assay, just nothing that he published or anything like that, but I think for the purposes of providing viticultural expertise to people growing Nebbiolo, he did just a mapping assay of various Nebbiolo sites around Australia and a summation of solar and ultraviolet gain. Although we have the highest altitude site in Beechworth, we're at 820, we had by far the highest solar gain of all the Nebbiolo sites that he assessed. Now, we've gone really high altitude for climate change mitigation and your concern is always, will these grapes get ripe? Have we gone too far? Is it a borderline situation? But as our vines mature and we get to know the site better, because I think it takes 15 years to get to know a site and we're only 10 years in and only five years in for cropping, that I think has some weight in what we're trying to do. So what was the site like then when you took it over in 2012 where there was no vines on it? Oh, bare paddock, bare paddock, nothing. That's why we could afford to buy it. There was a borehole dug but no pump in it, no power, no water, no sheds, no fences. So yeah, we could afford to buy it because it was basically undeveloped. The farmer that we bought it from had had a farm accident. He owned a lot of land in the area and he'd been selling off farm by farm because he'd had a farm accident and was disabled. So sort of just living off, selling off blocks. So a bit sad, but he was lovely and he got to see us plant the vineyard before he passed away, I think in 2018 or 2019, and that cheered him up immensely. Farmers like to see their land used and he's like, yes, okay, someone's bought it and has done something with it. Yeah, great. So what varieties did you first plant and why did you choose them? We've got Chardonnay and Syrah and Riesling and Nebbiolo planted. And we've got quite a lot of area that we can develop to grapes, but we've only developed maybe a quarter of what we could do. And we took the view that because we were developing the highest site in the GI, that we were in some senses going to be, not pioneers, but it was our job to find out what was best suited to the site in the time that we had. So 10 or 12 years ago, I would have said Chardonnay and Syrah were the hero varieties for the region. Now, obviously Chardonnay's ascendancy has continued unchecked and that's wonderful for the region. Syrah is a little bit trickier. It's obviously getting a little bit harder to sell. An observation I've made is that folks, when they've left full body Shiraz, they haven't gone to Syrah, they've gone to Pinot and Grenache. So there's work to be done there. Riesling and Nebbiolo were not alternative choices, but we had drunk enough riesling by then that we knew that shales and slates and mudstones and those sort of old sedimentary soils had some really good potential. Obviously, in Germany and Austria and Alsace, there are contemporaries of sort of basic rock type and with the altitude that we had, we knew we were going to have good acid retention and we love riesling. So that was the decision behind putting riesling in and that's been a good one so far. And Nebbiolo was probably a little bit of a wild card. I just love the variety. It's probably my pet favourite. That's also proven to be a pretty smart choice too, because in the time that we've been there, there's been such a groundswell of really exciting Nebbiolo planted and developed in the region. There is a fair bit of Neb in Beechworth now, isn't there? Yeah, there's like six or seven really strong brands for the variety and, you know, I wouldn't discount other reds like Sangiovese and Gamay Bight by any means, but I do wonder if in another decade's time if Neb's going to potentially be the preeminent red for the GI. But, you know, it's not necessarily a contest, but it's lovely to have a good number of contemporaries doing similar things. There's great information sharing in Beechworth and great camaraderie and, you know, we seem really able to taste each other's wines without getting all tied up in ego and, oh, mine's better because it's this way or mine's better because it's that way. And it's like, that side tastes cool, that side tastes different and that's cool too. So, it's been wonderful in that regard. When did the vines first yield like a viable crop? When did you first make vines? Yeah, I raucously broke my promises to Jeremy because, you know, I told him, oh, you know, you usually get a commercial crop in three seasons. What we didn't do was we didn't push the vineyard with salt fertilisers. You know, I've got a fairly strong and developing, you know, organic to regenerative bent and wanted to fertilise with manures and compost and things like that and not use much, if at all, any herbicide, which meant vine establishment was particularly slow. We also use low vigour rootstocks and, you know, if you vitis vinifera, the roots go straight down because they come from the Caucasus and, you know, Eurasia. So, they've got to get down pretty quickly to get at the water in those tough areas, whereas the rootstock varieties of America, they're riparian. They grow on creek sides and riversides and they branch outwards. So, the behaviour of the rootstock varieties is a bit different to the behaviour of vinifera and being Beechworth, which is a phylloxera area, you've got to be on rootstock. So, choosing a low vigour rootstock in an area with pretty poor soils and not pushing it with salt fertilisers meant that, yeah, we got, we would have had a commercial harvest in 2020 if not for the catastrophic bushfires and the smoke that came with it, but I would call our first commercial harvest 2021. So, that's seven years after planting. Sorry, Jeremy. But yeah, we've been going all right ever since. Yeah, but you had access to other fruit in that time, so it wasn't, they're not the first. Yeah, like so many small family businesses like ours, you know, like Brian Martin or Adam Foster, you know, you have your home base, which is, you know, the heart and soul, but you also do purchase fruit, wine to keep stable income and experiment and work out who you are and what you're about and things like that as well. Did Jeremy design all the buildings and things like that on the property? It's been such a wonderful thing. Actually, the coolest thing that I never even thought about is his architectural software. It knows for a, you know, a map point, knows where the sun hits at every time of the day of the year. So, when we've designed the vineyard expansion, which hopefully is coming in the next few years as well, he can basically just slightly change the orientation of the rows. You know, we've said, well, we don't want the sun to hit it in February and January between sort of 2 and 5pm because that's the fiercest sun. And he can just like tick, tick, tick, tick, and make it so that Oh, it's so cool. Is there anything else that exists in like the viticultural world like that? Or is this just like... Look, it's, it's obviously a little bit specific to Jeremy having the cool software, but I think that's something that particularly with people coping with climate change, and that's going to spread to Europe as well. Folks who are replanting vineyards are going to look at things like that because if you can obtain, you know, canopy shading in the sunburn, you can have better quality phenolics and things like that. So, I think that's going to be one of the tools of management that gets used more and more with the changing climate. You wouldn't have predicted that at Transport? I wasn't thinking about that at all. No. Tell me about the Brunnan Vineyard, the neighbours. Our neighbours. Oh, Derek and Anne. How did that come about? They were there from the moment we, we obviously bought the block. They're a quiet couple, they keep to themselves, but they planted that vineyard in the late 90s as a hobby. You know, it's deliciously handmade. Some of the rows are different width to the others and the vines are sort of, you know, they're dancing in their, their trunk sway and things like that. But, you know, it's Pinot and Chardonnay planted at about 790 metres above sea level. And, you know, the vines are 30 years old now. What we've worked out, not through knowing, but just through deducing through making the wines, is that the Pinot and Chardonnay is old sparkling clone, which makes sense because the vine stock came from the Alpine valleys in the mid 90s. So that's what would Pinot and Chardonnay have been back then. And the vines behave accordingly, viticulturally as well. So, you know, it took us a few years to work out what to do when. You know, we do shoot thinning quite late because even though the site's unirrigated, it's also reasonably vigorous because unusually they're on their own roots and they've got a good water supply down deep. So, you know, late shoot thinning means you don't get excessive lateral growth shading the fruit. You know, we do, we've been uncertified organic since the winter of 16 in there. So, you know, you do some pretty careful fruit thinning at or around Verizon to make sure there's airflow around everything. Just a few other tweaks in that regard, but it's been an absolute blessing to be able to work with that fruit for 10 years now. And how did that relationship come about? You said they planted it as a hobby, so it wasn't yielding like massive contributions. Yeah, I mean, they made some wine for themselves in the early days. Then their kids became teenagers and they had their own businesses and things like that. Some local vineyards had been making the wine for themselves for a few years. I think us moving up there coincided with, you know, the last few years before they retired. So, I don't know, just struck up a conversation and said, can we have a go? And they said, sure, give it a crack. We did quite a bit of work in there ourselves for the first couple of years, but once we got a sense for how it probably should be managed for what we're trying to do, Derek and Ann took that work back and they do it all themselves now, just the way we do it. So, you know, we share a bit of equipment with them and they, you know, use the same spray program as us and so on and so forth. So, it's a really fortunate, positive thing to just turn up to plant a vineyard and have you across the road, neighbour, have a tiny vineyard right there as well. Did the first VS&B wines come from there? Yeah, yeah. So, 2014 was the first harvest of us on their fruit and yeah, it's 11 years now and only skipping 2020 when the smoke happened. So, we've talked a bit about the height of these vineyards. What does that do to the wine? Like, what influences altitude have on bread growing and such a good wines? Us going high altitude obviously specifically was a climate change mitigation factor. You know, we chose our site because it would be cooler and because the rainfall would be higher and probably because I've got a viticultural background. I think one of, hopefully it comes through in the wines we make, one of the strongest themes that we have is, you know, capturing fruit purity and conveying it reasonably honestly. We're not dogmatic winemakers. If the vintage throws us something whack, we will respond to it. But as a general rule, we're trying to work with fruit that we don't need to mess around with too much, you know, not too much in the way of acid adjustments or anything like that. Just elevated natural acidity or acidity that you don't need to adjust essentially is the goal. And most years that's bang on. And yeah, just capturing, you know, aromatic, bright, crisp fruit characters and, you know, getting it through its process and conveying that to the drinker pretty honestly is probably what the goal is about working with the high altitude sites. Yeah. So, talk me through your range. So, this is from the, this is a state grown fruit, the Thorley range? Yes. We're just at the point now where we're releasing our 2023 single site wines from Beechworth. So, the Thorley and the Brunnen wines. I bought the Chardonnay along, you know, it seemed to make sense to bring a Beechworth Chardonnay. Our range is, you know, we have probably a more early drinking and lower price range of wines from the King Valley, including though the Obstgarden Rieslings, which are a super important part of what we do because when people come to us, they're generally either coming to us for modern Australian Riesling styles or they're coming to us for traditional Beechworth Chardonnays and now the Nebbiolo and things like that. So, the Obstgardens have been singularly important because, you know, I'm sure you're seeing it at Halliday and Hardy Grant as well. Coming off a reasonably small base, it's not taking over the world like Pinot Noir or Gourmet perhaps, but people are open to drinking Riesling in a bunch of different styles now in a way that they weren't a decade ago and that's been really wonderful. So, you know, we've got a modern Trocken style, a modern Cabernet style and a reasonably modern Spittler style from the King Valley and those are the Obstgardens, TEK and Selection. We've got some funner stuff like a Chillable Barbera and, you know, a Skinsy Grey and things like that as well. And then our neighbours Brunon, Pinot and Chardonnay and then our home vineyards. So, we've got a Riesling, a Chardonnay, a Nebbiolo and a Syrah. 2023 was the coldest conditions I've ever worked in. You know, I remember 2002 being really cold in orange and thinking, oh wow, I wonder how often I'll see this. This was easily as cold if not colder than that and it taught us an awful lot. It taught us so much about flavour development and how vignerons in colder parts of Europe made decisions about the varieties that they planted because we watched Chardonnay and Riesling romp through. I mean, this was harvested maybe around the 24th of April and the Riesling was just into May. How much later is that than usual? Our goal is to be harvesting around the equinox, so in mid-March. So, you know, three weeks later than we'd like. I mean, we've harvested as early as early March and as late as early May. So, yeah, I would have called it three to four weeks later than what is the new normal. You know, I thought you would imagine that in really cold seasons you'd make thin, lean, unyielding examples, but I actually think this has got quite a lot of creaminess and richness and flavour development. You know, we're full malo with our Chardonnays because we have to be because the acidity is so high, but in a really cold year you get much more malic acid. So, by the end of malo, which was Christmas, this had developed into quite, I mean, it still finishes quite chalky and compact and long, but there's a lot of flavour development in there and quite a lot of richness that you might not otherwise expect. We didn't make a couple of reds in 2023 because it was just too cold. But yeah, it taught us how varieties respond to really difficult weather. And one of the surprising things was although Anebiolo didn't make it to table wine ripeness, it is just about bloody impervious to Botrytis. And, you know, white varieties, you can pick up a little bit of Botrytis and you can pick through it, you know, a couple of percent in Chardonnays. You'll see that pop up in colder climate wines, particularly in Tasmania. Riesling, obviously Botrytis is more or less a part of the style. It's a winemaking decision how much you include into it. And, you know, you can talk about, you know, more glycerol characters in the resulting wines and the flavour components that come from Botrytis, like, you know, Apricot Kernel and so forth, they can actually meld pretty well in with the ripening characters of Riesling. And it's pretty uncommon in Australia to have those conditions. Is Beechworth an area that is kind of prone to Botrytis? No, no, no. We're just the highest site. And it was super cold. So a lot of the lower altitude Beechworth vignerons had a cracker of a 23 vintage because it was the old normal for them. You know, they were harvesting three to four weeks later, but that was what it used to be like in the 90s. So it was like a throwback for them. And they're super happy with their wines. You know, for us, a bit cold a bit later, it was, yeah, it taught us a lot of things. And we've made some lovely, perhaps a tiny bit unusual wines from it, but certainly instructive and hopefully delicious. So the Obstgarten range, that is, for people who don't know, Jeremy is Austrian, or his parents were Austrian. Half Austrian, yeah. Aussie mum, dad is from Graz, which is in Styria. Yep. And Obstgarten is the German word for orchard, am I correct? Yes. So it sort of, it indicates, you know, a panoply of bright fruits, essentially. Is this Germanic style that you're kind of leaning into Jeremy's influence, or is it just- A hundred percent. Yeah? Yeah. We made the choice to have a family and, you know, thought we'll have one last hurrah of an overseas vintage before we do the family way thing. And in 2015, he did vintage at Keller in Reinhessen in Germany, and I did a brief vintage at Rinaldi in Barolo. He wanted to, he's got a European passport, rub it in. I do not- And you're not claiming? We didn't marry, so no. Oh, fair enough. And Austria is a bit old fashioned. I'd have to go and live there for four years and things like that. And that's fine. Austria is gorgeous, but kind of works against having a vineyard in Australia. We both learnt so many cool, different things about the two varieties that are really close to our heart. And, you know, he brought back ideas about differential picking dates and, you know, cross blending a bit of this and a bit of that from his work at Keller. And yeah, the Obstgarten range of wines are really the development of his, you know, vision for what those styles of wines could be translated to in an Australian context. And it's pretty cool. So for people who might not know, when we say like a Germanic style of Riesling, I don't know, it's a spectrum, but what are we saying? Like what's the difference? It's essentially code for playing on residual sugar levels. The easiest way to describe it is to talk about the bloody great argument we had when he came back and said, right, we're going to pick a bit at this Beaumet and we're going to pick a bit at that Beaumet. I went to university twice, so I got my learning from school and books before I went out and worked. And then, you know, this is 15, 20 years ago, Australian winemakers, they tend to pick a vineyard once. It's ripe when it's ripe and you've got to get it. You've got to get it within a 48 hour window or, you know, you're losing potential quality. And I can see why they make that decision, particularly when they're racing hot weather and acid dropping out and things like that in warmer climates. But it's not like that at all in colder places. Actually, you've got time. So you can pick over weeks because you might only have your family, you know, six or ten people who can pick. So we're going to pick a bit of that vineyard there and a bit of that vineyard there. And over three, four, five hundred years, you come up with the concept, oh, if we go in there and we pick all the fruit that looks like that, it'll make a wine that tastes like this. And then we can go back a week later and get this fruit that looks a bit like that. And it'll make a slightly different spectrum of wine that looks like this. And I'm sure those wine styles evolved from hedging your bets against really difficult seasons. But that translates to styles that we just associate with regions as well. And it makes sense because, you know, Alsace Rieslings, you typically associate with being drier, more dry extract, more phenolic structure and power. Obviously, a dry region didn't have to do all those different picking dates to, you know, get around challenges and botrytis and things like that. But it's, yeah, it's just it's been an absolute gift learning about different picking and the styles of wine you can make from, you know, stuff that's only 10, 10 and a half percent alcohol, but has a little, you know, a nice little flush of residual sugar in it and stuff that's out to 12 and a half percent alcohol, which is, you know, much more, you know, unctuous and orange fruited and so forth. So, yeah, it's hopefully Germanic styles shouldn't indicate to folks that there's rifts on residual sugar. So we've got a Trocken style that still actually has about, you know, two to six grams residual, depending on the season. And it's just ballast, fruit ballast for the natural acidity, essentially. But how does it compare to, say, like a dry Riesling from the Kek, sorry, the Clare? Is it still got a bit more sweetness to it or is it like bone dry? In the same way as most people who drink Sauvignon Blanc don't realise that there's 7, 10, 12 grams of residual in that because the pH is really low and the acidity is quite high. They drink it and it tastes dry to them. In the dry style that we make, you shouldn't see the sugar. You can just, I just call it a toothsomeness. You know, it's not the first thing you don't think is, oh gosh, that's acidic. That acid's really harsh. It's just ballast and balance for the acidity. So that's kind of the role of residual sugar is just to kind of... In that wine particularly. Yeah. And in the Cabernet style, you know, that's the earliest pick fruit. So, you know, obviously elevated acidity can cope with a little bit more residual sugar. And with the later pick stuff, with a little bit of skin contact and a little bit of raisining, if that's what the year's giving or a little bit of botrytis, if that's what the year's giving, then you can look at more developed fruit characters and so forth. How have these wines been received by consumers? Really, unexpectedly well. You know, I had dogma in my mind. I've been kind of getting rid of dogma my whole career. You know, I've had people say to me in the early days, you can make the best Riesling in Australia and it's, you know, you're going to have to charge this much for it. And people are just going to go and drink German anyway. And I'm like, oh God. And I've had people say, you can make, you know, the best Nebbiolo in Australia and people are still going to just buy Lange. And it's rubbish. No, it's been lovely. I mean, we're a small family business. I'm not sure I'd want to be going out there selling 10,000 cases of Germanic style Riesling, but what we're making it the size we're making it, we're able to get it to restaurants and to sommeliers. And obviously they do a huge job of telling our story for us. And now in the next five or 10 years, when the focus is a bit more at home and perhaps, you know, growing direct sales and developing a cellar door experience in coming years, hopefully people will come to us and hear it from the horse's mouth. How would you describe just more generally speaking, your winemaking philosophy? Like how do you make your wines? Yeah. Back to that vineyard led capture purity of fruit, not too much fussing around. We are not people who do, you know, five bench trials the week before bottling and tweak this and tweak that. If there's a problem that shows itself early on, we will remedy it because again, not that dogma thing. You don't let a season of hard work go to waste because you can't do anything about something that comes up. It's a bit like shepherding, you know, the shepherd is watching the direction of where things are going. If it's heading towards the cliff, you know, bring it back from that edge. If it's heading towards the walls, you bring it back from that edge. But if it's going along okay and they're eating the grass and everything's going well, you sit under a tree and read a book. So, you know, guidance as opposed to heavy intervention but hopefully what you see in the glass at the end is fairly purely fruited with not a lot of artifice involved. Now, do you prefer, maybe a broad question, but you've worked at wineries like Kooyong and even Wolf Blyson, these kind of big, you know, much bigger wineries where I imagine the role of winemaker and viticulturist were much more separate. Can you explain a bit about, I guess, what appeals about being a vineyard model? Yeah. Yeah. We didn't envisage it would fit so perfectly but one of the best things about Beechworth is the overwhelming majority of people living and growing grapes and making wine in Beechworth are vineyards. And that wasn't something that we thought about before we moved there but when we landed there, it's like, oh, yeah, the person driving the tractor and spraying the vineyard is the person crushing the grapes and making the wine is the person chatting about it at the end of the day. It's probably a connection to land that speaks really strongly to me and gives me the probably most satisfaction that I have in my job. I tend to get pretty fractious when the demands of administration and logistics take me away from the land as they kind of had at this stage of the business. But following something through from the paddock to the product is, yeah, a huge part of what, you know, what fulfills the soul, definitely for me, 100%. Would you rather be in the vineyard or the winery? Oh, vineyard, every time. But that's also pretty common to the folks in Beechworth as well. There's not too many heavy tinkerers. And you mentioned the cellar doors in the works. How long is that? Jeremy. Yeah, it's a bit of how long is a piece of string. I'm sure we will be up and running by next spring. The concept keeps developing, which is a lovely thing. One of the things Jeremy's actually best at, and it's funny, the older you get, the more patient you get as well, because once you bash a concept out, you let it sit and you go and do something else to make money for a bit and then you come back to it and it's like, we should do this instead. And then you go away and do something else to make money for a few weeks and you come back and you're like, this would be a good idea as well. So the cellar door concepts that we have now is a lot different to what we were thinking five years ago before the pandemic hit and we had to sort of put it on ice. So I think the concept that we have kind of bashed out is a pretty good one. And hopefully we can provide a really good experience for folks when they, you know, make an appointment and come. We'll probably only be a Friday to Monday cellar door, but hopefully, you know, Beechworth has a lot of visitation and hopefully we'll, you know, catch a bit of that and introduce them to some cool high altitude wines. Can people come and visit you now by appointment? Yeah. Oh, if you, yeah, if you send an email or call, you know, a few days to a week before you want to come up, yeah, come and call me for sure. Awesome. All right. We'll just finish with some quick fire questions. If you weren't a winemaker, what would you be? A botanical artist. I love drawing. Yeah. Art was my best subject at school. Oh, cool. Only botanicals though. Yeah. Plants. I like plants. What are you drinking at the moment? Riesling in all forms and shapes and Nebbiolo in all forms and shapes. Where are you drinking at the moment? I love the boys at Vex. Vex Dining. I love Negesh at Monze. Yeah. I guess we tend to, yeah, support people who we love, who are doing great things. I can't answer for Jeremy for, but he's, I mean, he's got his little holes in the wall in Sydney that he loves as well. Yeah. Do you have a bucket list wine? There's a few. You pick up things from podcasts and what people talk about. I'd love to try an Acomaso Barolo from, you know, with a bit of age on it. He's a pretty, what I've listened to Levi Dalton talk about in his podcast makes that sound pretty interesting. There's a few champagnes that I've tried once or twice that I'd love to try again someday that are pretty hard to get your hands on for sure. And I've never tried a Keller G Max, although Jeremy has, and I'd love to try one of those as well. Do you have a wine guilty pleasure? Oh yeah. Trashy Sauvignon Blanc. So I was working in hospitality through the mid-aughts when I was going through university when that whole thing exploded and I never drank the stuff. So it was never like revolting for me. So I can very, very comfortably enjoy a glass of, you know, well, not trashy, but reasonably good Sauvignon Blanc without feeling in any way cringe. Yeah, actually, sorry. That's bad, badly. Ain't no guilt. Do you have a favourite food and wine pairing? Look, it's, I mean, it's pretty hard to go past a lovely Rose Chouk and beautiful Chardonnay. It's a little missionary position, but there's a reason that it works. And I also love Cabernet Riesling and oysters. I was going to ask if you had a weirdest food and wine pairing that worked and maybe that can be it. Yeah, I don't think it's super. I mean, I suppose we talk about champagne and oysters and Muscadet and pig pool and oysters, but the, the marine salt of oysters works really well. It works really well. Yeah. It's like, it's like the salt and lime on a margarita. Yeah, right. So it does the same. It makes total sense when you say, you know, most, most of the suggested pairings with oysters are like quite, you know, high acid. Often the vinaigrettes that people put on, on natural oysters. Well, yeah, the vinaigrettes people put on oysters often have a little bit of a sweet element in it, like finger lime or mignonette. Or the shorts and things like that. But yeah, Cabernet Riesling works really well with oysters. Good to know. Wine region you'd most like to work in that you haven't? Would love to. I mean, I've never worked in the Mosul, so I'd be, my knees might not like it, but I'd love to work in the Mosul. And I, when I do vintage, I really want to pick grapes as much as vinify things. So I don't just want to lug hoses and clean the press. I'd like to do that at home. Well, I'd want to pick things. I want to smell the rocks. I want to look at the, the grass and the Forbes species that are growing around the vineyard, because they tell you something about what the soil is doing. You get a sense of the climate and the weather patterns and the humidity and the conditions at harvest. And those, those things that combine to give a feeling, actually have a really big impact on how the wine tastes subsequently. And wine region you'd most like to visit just to hang out and drink the wines? Go back to the Lange anytime. Truffles and Barolo and grower champagne's pretty nice. That's my number one. Yeah. Awesome. That's all from me. Is there anything you want to mention, anything you've got coming up that you want to plug or? Oh, not specifically. We've got quite a few little events coming up. Just, you know, little bar takeovers and wine, you know, the wine dinner is not a huge thing at the moment, but the food dinner where, you know, someone's pouring the wine at the same time, that seems to be what people like to do these days. Keep your eye on social media. We're doing quite a lot of little things in the next sort of six to eight weeks. So there's lots of opportunities until the silly season to come and have a little bit of S&B in your glass while you eat some delicious food and snacks between Melbourne and Sydney and beyond. Where can we find you on social media? Oh, VSNBwines on Instagram and I'm not on anything else. That's okay. Thanks so much, Anna. It was great to chat. Thanks for listening to the Holiday Wine Companion podcast. Thirsty for more? Join the Holiday Wine Club for premium 95 plus point wines delivered monthly. Visit winecompanion.com.au or check the show notes to subscribe.