“New Wave Cabernet 50 Years on the Indian Ocean Coast” – Wine and Spirits, February 2018

People wear fewer clothes in a beach town. Margaret River is a place where T-shirts and board shorts rule. The cabernets of this surf culture share the same aesthetic: dressed down, physically pragmatic, their beauty tied to motion, equilibrium and grace.

What does motion have to do with wine? You might think of it as kinetic energy plus direction, two concepts that don’t often enter discussions about cabernet sauvignon. In Bordeaux, château proprietors often talk about the difference in the soil beneath their vines, the ratios of river stones, clay or sand that distinguish their wine’s expression from their neighbors’. In Napa Valley, there’s talk of soil, fog and prodigious ripeness, along with the grain of the oak barrels that aerates that ripe fruit to succulent grandeur.

In Margaret River, there is the wind, direct from the sea, separated from some cabernet vines by less than two miles of jarrah forest, a coastal landscape sustained by saturating winter rains and temperate, dry summers. Save for the winds, the competition from invasive plants, the hungry birds and the errant kangaroos, cows and other uninvited guests at harvest, there is no more copacetic place to grow great cabernet than Margaret River. Bill Minchin planted the first vineyard in what is now the Margaret River region. Like most of the pioneers, he was based in Wilyabrup, a three-hour drive south of Perth, in the northern third of a blunt promontory of land that juts out into the Indian Ocean on Western Australia’s coast. It’s 62 miles from north to south, bisected in the middle by the Margaret River, a creek running through the small town that shares its name; the region extends inland for 17 miles from the sea, but most all of the great cabernet vineyards fall in two neighborhoods: one west of town, in an area defined by Stevens Road (Cape Mentelle and Leeuwin Estate settled here early on, followed by Xanadu and Voyager), and Wilyabrup, west of Cowaramup and north of Margaret River, where the original vineyards clustered around Caves Road, barely two miles from the sea. You won’t likely find any of Minchin’s Merrifield cabernet. According to a history by Peter Forrestal and Ray Jordan published in 2017 (50 years after the earliest vineyards went into the ground), Minchin lost his first crop to possums and, later, after he’d given up on the vineyard, lost his stocks in a fire that destroyed the family home. Tom Cullity and Bill Pannell, two doctors from Perth, had better luck with their respective vineyards—Cullity at Vasse Felix and Pannell at Moss Wood. They’d both heard the buzz about the potential for viticulture in this untested region, driven by the state viticulturist, Bill Jamieson, who was busy promoting a paper by John Gladstones, a local agronomist. Gladstones posited that conditions in Margaret River were better suited to the vine than conditions in any of Australia’s established growing regions—the only caveat being the need for a site with well-drained soil, given the abundant winter rains.

Cullity, who was out digging soil pits on the weekend wherever anyone would allow it, found a parcel near Caves Road in Wilyabrup, but the owner wouldn’t sell. He got an assist from the local GP, Dr. Kevin Cullen, who was optimistic that vineyards might jumpstart the economy and raise the land values in the area. The intransigent owner of the land happened to work on Cullen’s cattle ranch, and Cullen convinced him to trade the eight-acre parcel Cullity wanted for 16 acres of the Cullen ranch. Then Cullen sold those eight acres to Cullity, who established Vasse Felix on the site. Pannell found 26 acres just to the north of Cullity; the Jupiters, Cullity’s new neighbors, planted vines on their ranch; and the Cullens eventually planted as well, forming the early nexus of Wilyabrup cabernet vineyards. The plant material came from Jack Mann and his son, Dorham, who tended cabernet sauvignon at Houghton in the Swan River Valley, northeast of Perth. Fifty years on, successive generations of those original selections have become a distinctive asset of Margaret River cabernet.

My First introduction to those vines came in the 1990’s. Ted Schrauth had grown up in New England, married a doctor from Perth, and settled there, exporting wines to the states and running fi shing expeditions with friends in the trade o Nantucket Island. Fishing was fi ne, but it was the promise of diving for abalone o the Margaret River coast that convinced me to head to Western Australia. At six a.m. one morning, Schrauth collected me and my duel from Leeuwin Estate and we headed to the beach. We donned wetsuits in a parking lot by the rocky shore and swam out to two massive underwater rock outcroppings, each forming the wall of a channel, where the abalone attached themselves, fattening up on bits of kelp ripped up by the waves. We had to battle the same currents that were feeding the abalone, and my haul was not quite up to Schrauth’s. Too busy catching my breath, then swimming down and trying to pry the creatures o the rocks, I didn’t notice that I’d scraped a gash in my ankle until towelling off.

Schrauth drove us to Moss Wood for first aid. Inside the winery, a simple insulated steel structure with a cavernous door on the west side, Keith Mugford was by the tanks, wrestling with some hoses on the floor which is pretty much the same place I found him when I returned this past November, except the hoses were attached to a mobile bottling line that had backed up to the door. Expressing some relief that he didn’t need to bandage me up this time, Mugford led me out to the vineyard, a sheltered hillside facing north, toward the sun, and east, away from the wind. Within the 29 acres of vines, he still tends some of the original vines the Pannell family planted in 1969. He’s been here since 1979, staying on with his wife, Clare, to lease the property from the Pannells in 1984 and then buy it a year later. The relatively warm, sheltered site ripens cabernet more reliably than a parcel the Mugfords purchased one mile south. “When we bought Ribbon Vale in 2000, the tannins in the cabernet were often hard,” Clare told me as we drove to see it. The parcel is a long, narrow strip of vineyards with a grove of trees in the middle, which they planted to alleviate some of the wind stress on those vines. “Now that the trees provide some protection, we are getting better ripeness and softer tannins,” Clare said.

Back in his aging cellar, Mugford filled a glass from one barrel, the fruit of the short rows at the top of the hill, part of the 1971 planting at Moss Wood, then another from the long rows down the hill, the 1970 planting; the Pannells propagated those vines from the “super selection” of cabernet that Dorham Mann had developed, narrowing his father’s original selection of 29 vines down to five. The wine from the short rows tasted meaty and sweet, with long, graceful tannins. The cabernet from down the hill gave more cassis-driven fruit. And a blend from the “old block,” the original planting (including Jack Mann’s selection and Dorham’s super selection), was rich and spicy, with more openness to the tannins and beautiful red-berry fruitiness. I was thinking about these young wines the next day, at a retrospective tasting of Margaret River cabernet hosted at Vasse Felix. Moss Wood showed the 2005, a cabernet just hitting its stride. The ripe currant tones apparent in the barrel samples had gained resonance, while the wine still carried the energy and freshness of fruit grown on the Margaret River coast, the warm-cool of the sand and the surf, red spice and black fruit, complete and delicate.