1994 - Now: Developing Three Hills

Backing our judgement about where and how to grow grapes, trying new varieties, developing iconic wines, and establishing the Three Hills Estate

By the decade of the nineties the wine enterprise had grown. We were buying in grapes, we made wine for others, we were helping to operate other peoples vineyards. Our own vineyard had been revamped with new trellising. Our 'Jarrah Country' had thin dry sandy soils. It surrounds a shire gravel pit. So, we started in a hard school. I had learned a great deal about improving the soil and the importance of mulch in conserving soil moisture.

I could see that the country near Dunsborough was too hot and dry in the ripening period, sugar accumulation was a forced march and the flavour remained green, even at high sugar levels. The temperature record for Cape Naturaliste lighthouse showed many more days with maxima above 30°C than at Cape Leeuwin. My experience and reading of John Gladstones innovative text 'Viticulture and Environment' first published in 1992, led me to the idea that the best flavours would be obtained further south. It's a gentler, more humid environment on the south coast.

So, I looked at the country close to Augusta. The first farmer I approached happened to be having a get-together with his neighbours. Whilst he himself wasn't ready to sell, his neighbour - with an equally good property - was being chased by the bank, and keen to sell. We bought a section of his block, offered him a job as vineyard manager, he was happy, and we were off and running.

I planted thirty grape varieties. Some people thought the late varieties would not ripen properly and indeed, under conventional viticultural practices they won't. Many had written off Pinot Noir in Margaret River because it's too warm here. At Three Hills all but the very latest varieties and the most disease susceptible are successful. We have grafted over Furmint because the grapes rot and the Graciano remains a challenge. But that leaves 28 varieties that do very well.

I wanted to be able to predict which varieties would ripen under the most favourable conditions before we picked the first grape. I wanted to know what the right ripening conditions actually are for each of the grapes we grow. This led to my work monitoring temperature in vineyards between the Swan Valley and Bremer Bay and comparing the growing season in quality wine producing areas overseas with that in various parts of Australia. I wanted to work out the way to manage vines so as to produce the best mix of flavours at maturity. The results of this effort were published in industry journals and in an 'e book' you can purchase in our shop.

The Karridale Vineyard puts into practice what I had learned. The new vineyard gave us the opportunity to:

• Explore the range of flavours that can be achieved by utilizing different grape varieties. There are many experimental plots, with twenty-one red varieties and nine white.
• Design new trellising arrangement to maximise fruit and leaf exposure. Necessarily the vines must be harvested by hand and worked by quite small tractors. It is a vineyard designed for the vines rather than the tractor. There is no compromise of the objective of securing the right areal environment for the plant or its fruit. If the right culture demanded hand pruning and picking that is what we would do. This was diametrically opposed to industry trends.
• To limit yields to 10 tons per hectare. This can only be achieved with some varieties by heavy fruit thinning at verasion, a painstaking process, but nevertheless vital.
• Avoid irrigation except during establishment. The soils are generously deep. I believe that watering the plant was deleterious.

I made a deliberate decision to release only the best wines from the best years under the Three Hills Label.

I set out to monitor ripening temperatures at twenty minute intervals at this vineyard, and at fifteen benchmark locations across the south West of Western Australia between Perth and Bremer Bay. Hourly temperature records were accessed from benchmark locations overseas for purposes of comparison. The hope was that we could predict with some certainty what varieties should do well in the new vineyard, before we actually made the wine. I thought it vital that we should know how our location compared to places in Europe and elsewhere where wine of known characteristics is produced. John Gladstones had said that Margaret River has the ripening conditions of Bordeaux in a great year. OK, I wanted to chase the dream of making quite remarkable wines and I wanted to account for the differences that I saw when I compared the wines of Bordeaux and those of Margaret River.