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Full circle: 50 years of Vasse Felix Cabernet

30 October 2024 By Richard Woodard

As Vasse Felix releases its 50^th vintage of Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon, winemaker Virginia Willcock talks clonal serendipity, ‘lolly eaters’ and rediscovering the producer’s winemaking heritage. Richard Woodard reports.

During the 1850s, what you might call a Sliding Doors moment occurred on opposite sides of the winemaking world. The precise details are frustratingly fuzzy, but grape vines from Bordeaux – specifically Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec – arrived around the same time in Western Australia and Argentina.

“We don’t know for sure where the clones came from,” says Virginia Willcock, winemaker at Margaret River producer Vasse Felix. “But I was talking to Laura Catena, and they received Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec in the 1850s too.

“They talk about that heritage clone of Malbec being the best-performing in Argentina, and our Malbec looks just like their Malbec – scraggly bunch, small hen-and-chicken berries. So I think we have the same Malbec material. They decided to grow more Malbec – and we grew more Cabernet Sauvignon.”

That clonal material had been in Western Australia for more than a century by the time cardiologist Dr Tom Cullity planted the first Vasse Felix vines in 1967, on an eight-hectare plot close to the Wilyabrup Brook, 4km from the ocean. Research had likened the growing conditions in Margaret River to those of Bordeaux – although Willcock observes wryly: “That is not necessarily how we see ourselves now.”

Dr Cullity planted Cabernet and Malbec simply because they were the only Bordeaux varieties he could lay his hands on, adding Shiraz, and Riesling because he had fallen in love with German Riesling while working in the UK.

The first Cabernet vintage was meant to be 1971 – but the entire crop was eaten by birds, a perennial issue in the area. Dr Cullity even decided to use a peregrine falcon to resolve the problem but, after months of training, the bird was let loose – and promptly flew away, never to be seen again.

Instead, 1972 became the inaugural Vasse Felix Cabernet vintage – although even Willcock has never tasted it, and there’s only one bottle left in the winery archive – making the newly released 2021 vintage the 50^th made by the winery.

Far from easy

The early days were far from easy, Dr Cullity juggling his cardiology work in Perth with the five-hour drive south on gravel roads in his battered Peugeot to look after the vines at weekends. “People thought Tom was setting up some kind of hippy colony,” says Willcock. “He invited the locals to come and taste his Riesling after the first vintage, but they’d never had wine before – they’d only had beer. So they got smashed and Tom said some of them didn’t make it home that night.

“I think the ’70s and ’80s were a beautiful era in Margaret River and Australia. People had very little – they were making wines with what they had, and very naturally, with no winemaking equipment or technology. Tom got a barrel from his brother, who was a wood trader. They were cleaning vats and barrels with peppy tree branches and water from the Wilyabrup Brook.”

Yeasts were all natural, simply because they were unable to source commercial alternatives. Initially, the wines didn’t go through malolactic fermentation – until, in 1975, Dr Cullity imported a barrel of Château Figeac, siphoning off and bottling the contents. When he filled the barrel with his own wine, there was a huge fizzy malolactic reaction.

Early wines, made by Dr Cullity and then David Gregg, an English cheesemaker, followed this ‘natural’ path, with alcohol levels typically sitting below 13% ABV – although this wasn’t so much a philosophical decision as a pragmatic step to stop the birds from eating the grapes. “Dave Hohnen at Cape Mentelle always maintained that the ripeness of Margaret River Cabernet was because of the nets,” Willcock says.

Dr Cullity sold Vasse Felix to Gregg in 1985 but, lacking the funding of a cardiologist’s salary, he put the winery on the market two years later. The small newspaper ad was spotted by Robert Holmes à Court, Australia’s first billionaire, and the family has owned Vasse Felix ever since.

Distinct phases

The company’s winemaking history can be split into distinct phases. After the early days, Clive Otto was winemaker from 1989 to 2004. “Clive’s era was the beginning of the technical age of Australian winemaking,” says Willcock. “Inoculation and so on – everyone went through that technical revolution from the mid-’90s to the mid-2000s, and I think people at the time were trying to make wines bigger.”

The shadow of the Barossa loomed large over Australian winemaking – Otto was fond of adding Shiraz into the Vasse Felix Cabernet blend, something that Willcock has firmly eschewed since taking over from the 2007 vintage.

“I think there’s a lack of confidence when you look to fill the palate of a wine, rather than letting it speak for itself,” she argues. “I wanted that shape and form of Cabernet to be its actual self, from our place. The idea of Shiraz as gap-filling, I think that’s the biggest load of bollocks – the thought that Cabernet has a gap. It doesn’t. It has shape and form.”

After the “finding my feet” 2007 vintage, Willcock began to get into her stride with 2008 – “It was very tight when it was young, but I’ve loved watching that wine evolve” – and reached “a whole new level of confidence” in her winemaking in 2012, when she reverted to 100% natural fermentation.

Where Otto had finished his ferments in barrel, producing darker, richer wines, Willcock “went the other way” and left the wine on skins to stabilise, avoiding the need to press off early and finish the ferment in barrel. Lower-impact oak – no American, finer-grained French – became the norm.

“In Western Australia, we don’t drink big, heavy wines because we don’t make them,” Willcock explains. “And, when we drink other people’s wines, we’re buying European wines, like Burgundy.”

The philosophy extends to Tom Cullity, the Cabernet-Malbec blend that sits at the pinnacle of the Vasse Felix range (the 2020 vintage has recently landed in the UK). Counter-intuitively, the aim here is not to make a bigger, blockbuster wine, but to focus even more sharply on delicacy and elegance.

“I have a savoury tooth and we are a savoury wine house,” says Willcock. “There are two types of people in the world: olive eaters and lolly [sweet] eaters. As these wines age, you get more savoury characters coming through, like cedar. Younger, I like to see some of that Aussie forest floor character – twigs and leaves.”

If Willcock’s winemaking philosophy felt like a departure from the past, and that “technical” age presided over by Clive Otto, she was unknowingly treading a familiar path. “David Gregg and Tom Cullity believed wines should be about framework and structure – they should not be ‘big’ wines,” Willcock says. “I didn’t realise that until I read it from the early 1970s, that they were trying to do what I was trying to do. It’s been a beautiful journey of discovery.”

Vasse Felix wines, including the newly released Vasse Felix Cabernet Sauvignon 2021 and Vasse Felix Tom Cullity Cabernet Sauvignon Malbec 2020, are represented in the UK by Fells.

https://fells.co.uk/our-producers/vasse-felix/

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