Starting again after China slams shut

STARTING AGAIN

after China slams shut

Fred O’Keefe wants to make wine for everyone.

When wine diehards discover his 11-hectare vineyard in Kialla they tell him he’s selling the bottles too cheap, but that doesn’t bother Fred.

“I remember when we fi rst opened the cellar door you’d get embarrassed people asking ‘do you have any sweet wines?’ and I’d go ‘yeah!’,” he said.

“They’d been to other wineries and felt ashamed they wanted sweet wine, but we all start on the sweet stuff .

“I made my fi rst few wines sweet for that reason . . . we have made both sweet wines and traditional style Shiraz from our very fi rst vintage in 2001. Absolutely anyone can come in here and I’ll have something they like.”

It sounds too good to be true, and right now it is, because Fred’s cellar door at his Broken River Vineyards is currently closed (but he says “watch this space!”).

The reason why is obvious when you notice the souvenirs from Fred’s trips to China scattered around his counter, cabinets and around the piano.

“We’d been over in China for 12 years and built up a pretty good business but we were cut off like that,” Fred said.

“I made a lot of friends over there and we still talk on WeChat but they are very — well, if the government says no then you can’t have it.”

Fred said even if the 218 per cent wine tariff was to be lifted, he couldn’t see the business returning.

“They love their alcohol in China and they loved their wines . . . but unfortunately we can’t do anything about it and I don’t think they are going to let Australian wine back in for at least fi ve years,” he said.

“Chile has taken over and picked up whatever Australia lost.”

Fred is now concentrating on fi nding new customers to unload the thousands upon thousands of bottles he has in storage.

This week alone he sold 144 bottles over Qoin — an Australian digital currency website popular among fi nancial types and tradies.

“I’m doing an experiment to see if I

Fred’s been fi ghting for signs on the Goulburn Valley Hwy for decades, but all VicRoads gave him were two on the bypass. “People on the bypass don’t want to stop, the tourists come up the highway but they miss all the signs.”

can get into other parts of Australia and it is working . . . how else do you get wine from here to there?” Fred said.

“Everything is an option as far as domestic goes.”

It is a far cry from the days when he crisscrossed China, racing from wine show to wine show.

“We don’t sell through our website,” Fred admitted.

“My son wants me to set it up but I’m not up with all that stuff . He’s at me all the time about it but I never did any of these things because I was in export.

“When you are moving in container lots you aren’t worried about selling a small amount through your website — but times have changed.”

Fred knows the cellar door needs

Fred O’Keefe with a Fred’s Red. Fred says his cellar door is like a hairdresser — people relax, have a yarn and “in the end I know their entire life story”. Fred O’Keefe in his vineyard. The vineyard has always used a mechanical harvester due to constant picker shortages, even 20 years ago. “We just get it out of the shed when we’re ready, and put it back when we’re done,” Fred says.

to return to its usual Friday, Saturday, Sunday business at some point, but deciding when to make the jump and put operating costs back on the ledger is a hard call.

“Half a dozen times a week you get a phone call asking what time we’re open and I say ‘if you’re coming and serious about buying wine, give me a bell and I’ll be there’,” Fred said.

“Our biggest problem in the past was VicRoads refusing to give us tourism signs on the Goulburn Valley Highway — people don’t know we’re here.”

Before the wine label, Fred and his wife Ruth worked as SPC orchardists and grew grapes on Verney Rd.

The pair started planting a new Shiraz vineyard at 425 River Rd, Kialla, 22 years ago and never looked back.

Half of the Kialla vines went into Shepparton fi ne sandy loam in an old cow paddock while the rest put roots down in Lemnos loam.

“I’m not a winemaker, I’m a viticulturalist. I’m more a farmer,” Fred said.

“When we started I wanted to make wine that I liked and I told the style to the wine maker who said ‘you’ll never sell that’, but that was fi ne, if I couldn’t sell it I’d drink it.”

However, this style turned out to be just want people wanted.

“We kept our wine really soft and easy drinking. Our Shiraz Cab was very popular in China, it worked well,” Fred said.

When it comes to deciding on wine blends, Fred gets his non-drinking son Peter (who has excellent taste buds) and wine drinking neighbour David together with a few others who like free drinks to pick which fl avours they like best.

Fred assures us it is an “extremely technical” process.

“I want to make wines that ordinary people will like, not wine judges,” he said.

It leaves only one question — what is Fred’s best wine?

“People ask me that question a lot,” he said.

“The wine you like best is my best wine.”

The infamous ‘Two Old Men’ label in the fl esh (or the glass?). This was the label Broken River Vineyards sold in China and was a smash hit. “People trusted you when your face was on the bottle,” Fred says.