Nick's Article: Gamay In The Hills – A Quiet Revolution?

Adelaide Hills winemaker Taras Ochota has a full winery at the moment. I stopped in at twilight the other night to taste through the new fermenting wines including a small tub (maybe just 400kg) of gamay sourced from up the hill in Piccadilly. The wine was superb!

Gamay has been well and truly off the radar in Australia with only small quantities of actually very good wines seeing the light of day in the last couple of decades. The Beechworth icon Sorrenberg has long held the mantle with a consistently great gamay but beyond that I can’t help but feel it’s been sidelined by pinot noir and is unfairly overlooked.

Recognizing my interest in this tiny tub of bubbling red and blue-fruited wine sitting in the middle of his fully-stored vintage shed, Ochota then brought out a bottle of the 2014 vintage, his first incarnation of this wine. It was made from a precious 70kg of gamay, the total amount of first crop from a tiny patch of vines with an extraordinary story.

The vines were planted in the Piccadilly Valley in 1985 by the well-known Adelaide Hills grower Sam Virgara, who proceeded to make and sell a gamay under his now defunct label Piccadilly Fields. But with the market thirsty for chardonnay (and Piccadilly chardonnay is amazing stuff) the timing for this gamay couldn’t have been worse. 

Virgara’s plantings of three gamay clones were subsequently cleared to make way for chardonnay at the behest of market forces. “The thirst for bigger reds especially from South Australia meant that the wine struggled to sell. Sam was getting great money for his chardonnay grapes so he grafted this small section and actually bulldozed most of it into the ground,” says Ochota. 

Having asked for the last handful of years, Ochota (who used to work for Virgara) convinced his old mate to chop the chardonnay grafts off and let the gamay grow back up. He was committed to take all the grapes he could harvest from the surviving patch, a plot that is roughly the size of a tennis court. 

He is also taking all the cuttings, which he is using to plant single-stake gamay along the ridge at his Basket Range property, so there’s a gamay renaissance of some sort underway, and I think it’ll suit the Adelaide Hills conditions. The timing is right this time around too with the market now thirsty for crunchy, light young reds.

The name “A Price of Silence” is taken from an Adelaide hardcore band who hit their straps in the 1990s roughly around the same time that gamay met its demise.

Ochota Barrels Gamay A Price of Silence 2014 

This has plenty of character and the berries run through shades of red and blue into more deep purple tones. There’s plenty of perfume and a touch of bracken, some earth and a little spice. The palate is supple and fleshy. Really soft velvety tannins fill out smoothly and carry ripe berry fruit flavours in a satisfying mid-weight style, all silk and curves. 92 points. Drink now.

RRP $50 – 99 bottles filled. Try Africola or La Buvette in Adelaide and Attica in Melbourne as they’ve got the lot!

It seems Ochota thrives on collaboration and also makes a McLaren Vale grenache wine called A Sense of Compression with Tool front man Maynard James Keenan. 

Contributing Editor Nick Stock is a renowned Australian wine writer, author, presenter and filmmaker who reports on his worldwide wine tasting experiences for JamesSuckling.com.