Seven hundred fifty million years is a long time. It also happens to be the age of the soils planted mostly with shiraz and cabernet sauvignon in South Australia’s Hickinbotham Vineyard. The 186-hectare property was first planted in 1858 and the pedigree of the grapes it has yielded over many vintages has seen it contribute to legendary wines including Penfolds Grange, Clarendon Hills and Eileen Hardy.
The Jackson family purchased the vineyard from the Hickinbotham family in 2012, acquiring a prized slice of South Australian wine country that neatly compliments their existing McLaren Vale property, Yangarra. I caught up with Hickinbotham winemaker Charlie Seppelt and Jackson Family Estate’s Chief Winemaker Chris Carpenter recently when they visited Melbourne to present their 2013 vintage wines.
Hickinbotham sits cradled in a climatic sweet spot along the elevated edge of the McLaren Vale wine region that abuts the Adelaide Hills in an area known as Clarendon. The rolling, folding hills of this vineyard create a diverse set of sites within the site. It is a patchwork of mostly terraced plots that equate to a complex viticultural jigsaw, delivering a matrix of possibilities for blending and assemblage in the winery.
The soils are super lean and, at 750 million years, they are much older than the soils down on the flatter main section of the McLaren Vale region. They deliver wines of refined power and the potential for great longevity.
Carpenter is a cabernet specialist and the project has been a fascinating one for him. “A big part of my first year in the project was devoted to tasting a lot of Australian cabernets to try to get my head around what the terroirs were like and what stylistic options were on offer. I needed to know if style was being driven by place or maker,” he says.
“Walking any vineyard, I reference what I know and the major similarity here to what I am working with in California is the elevation,” he says. Hickinbotham is upwards of 260m above sea level and the elevation exaggerates the diurnal temperature shift, warming in the morning and cooling in the evening. “It’s very similar to what happens in the mountains in Napa,” he adds.
The soils at Hickinbotham are quite different than the soils Carpenter works with in California, which are mostly sedimentary, delivering darker fruits and boldly stated, gravelly tannins. The extremely old, weathered and compact soils of Hickinbotham, which are very lean and light on nutrients, mean the vines have to work hard.
The resulting wines are finer in terms of minerality, and the fruit sits in a red-to-dark spectrum. “The tannins aren’t as big,” Carpenter adds, “but they’re very prevalent, a quality I attribute mostly to the climate.”
Seppelt describes the winemaking as a disciplined regime, starting with strictly managed yields at the hands of vineyard manager, Michael Lane. “Everything is hand-picked and run through our sorting machine. We have a standard four-day cold soak for tannin and color stability and we’re looking to capture pure vineyard characters early on,” he says.
“We try to do as much natural fermentation as possible. Shiraz is only plunged and is on skins for 18-21 days, it’s one of the highest and coolest parts of the region and we are trying to make a very pure expression. Cabernet is aeratively pumped over to set up a big platform of tannin which we then work on shaping,” he explains.
I tasted four wines from 2013: a merlot, shiraz, cabernet and cabernet shiraz blend. Carpenter says he is keen on making merlot wines that can change what he perceives as a negative attitude toward the variety in Australia. And he has a lot of faith in the pedigree of the vineyard. “This vineyard is of the same calibre as the best vineyards in places like the Rhône; it deserves to be in the same league as Hermitage and the great vineyards of the world.”
Overall the wines are very tight and exude a sense of compressed power. They’re disciplined, refined and pared back, which is not to say that oak isn’t clearly stated, but the base character of the vineyard is all-powerful and the terroir here has a leading role.
Click for notes and scores:
2013 Hickinbotham Vineyard The Revivalist Merlot
2013 Hickinbotham Vineyard Brooks Road Shiraz
2013 Hickinbotham Vineyard Trueman Cabernet Sauvignon
2013 Hickinbotham Vineyard The Peake Cabernet Shiraz
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.
