Tasmania cheers for 60 pioneering years

Picturesque riverbank setting of Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). Photo: Image credit: MONA/Jesse Hunniford

From its early humble beginnings, Moorilla is today regarded as a ‘jewel in Tasmania’s wine crown’. It’s been six decades since the first wines were produced from the site overlooking the Derwent River. That milestone was recently celebrated, as Mark Smith writes.

If you hadn’t heard of Tasmania’s David Walsh before January 2011, the opening of his Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) at Berriedale on the outskirts of Hobart is bound to have grabbed your attention. The professional gambler and art collector received countless plaudits for the way in which he changed how Australians looked at art and indeed Tasmania itself. The curation of his vast collection of antiquities, books and contemporary artworks was — and remains — innovative and unconventional.

Decades earlier, the 9ha site overlooking the River Derwent witnessed an act of creative expression that was similarly innovative and unconventional — the foot stomping of six cases of homegrown winegrapes. Italian immigrant Claudio Alcorso and his three-year-old daughter Caroline had bared their feet to make a little wine for family and friends. It turns out their tiny batch of 1962 vintage Riesling also made history. Today, Alcorso and his beloved Moorilla are regarded as Tasmanian wine pioneers. Back in mid-April, Walsh marked 60 years of Moorilla winemaking with a day of celebration on the busy property, 10km north of Hobart.

Before COVID-19, MONA had been welcoming 360,000¹visitors annually. (Tasmania’s population is 519,000²). Guests come to experience Australia’s largest private museum. Many enjoy on-site food, wine, entertainment and luxury accommodation. Moorilla’s 2ha vineyard is home to a modern winery that deals with the practicalities of processing fruit for still and sparkling wine production.

As a child, I walked past many times. Had I entered, I would have encountered Claudio’s earliest vintages. When the family company foundered, I bought Moorilla on a whim in 1995.

Around 200km away, the 14ha Tamar Valley vineyard of St Matthias fulfills additional demands for top quality Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Gris and Sauvignon Blanc. A smidgen of Bordeaux reds underscores the property’s 40-year heritage, while Shiraz provides hope and direction for the future. Alcorso became a household name during the 1960s and 1970s as a patron of the arts and creator of Silk and Textile Printers Pty Ltd (now Sheridan Australia). “I was raised just up the road from Moorilla,” Walsh recalls. “As a child, I walked past many times. Had I entered, I would have encountered Claudio’s earliest vintages. When the family company foundered, I bought Moorilla on a whim in 1995.” Alcorso died in August 2000 while resident on the property along with his wife Lesley.

Moorilla founder Claudio Alcorso in the vineyard, 1998. Photo: Mark Smith

YOU DESERVE Moorilla founder Claudio Alcorso in the vineyard, 1998. Photo: Mark SmithTHE BEST BEHIND YOU.

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Aerial view of Moorilla and Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) Photo: MONA/Stu Gibson

“I didn’t buy Moorilla for the wine,” Walsh admits.

“I was seeking an art warehouse. Now it’s the site of MONA, I see myself as custodian of Claudio’s heritage and of those that were here for thousands of years before him. Buying Moorilla is among the best decisions I’ve ever made.” Moorilla winemaker Conor van der Reest says the vineyard began with 90 Riesling cuttings planted in 1958. They were sourced by David Wynn, founder of Wynns Coonawarra Estate and Mountadam Vineyard. The cuttings came from a large vineyard planted at Modbury in Adelaide’s northeast in 1947. Alcorso’s autobiography³ notes Wynn was so impressed by the juice he subsequently tasted from Moorilla’s Riesling that he sent his friend 90 Cabernet Sauvignon cuttings. “It was validation of Claudio’s faith in his ambitious project,” van der Reest adds. “Those early years saw friends and government agencies actively discourage him from planting vines. Conventional wisdom asserted Tasmania was too cool for viticulture. ‘Apples and pears, Mr Alcorso,’ said one Ag Department official.” Ironically, those same fruits were already established on the property Alcorso came to purchase in 1947. Erosion caused by inappropriate farming practices and the lack of irrigation provided evidence of neglect rather than success. Walsh almost fell into a similar trap by adopting a French-style, unirrigated approach to management during his first years of ownership. Failure to take into account modest annual average rainfall — 573mm⁴ — put a significant number of vines on death row, he says. Insidious splitting of critical vine architecture aided and abetted the spread of trunk diseases. Few plantings from the 1960s and 1970s remain. They include three rows of old soldiers that survived transplanting from a utilitarian, wired-caged environment, torn down when a visitor centre and new landscaping were created at the end of the 1980s.

“Many vines were removed or succumbed to eutypa after suffering reduced yields,” Moorilla’s winemaker explains.

Those early years saw friends and government agencies actively discourage him from planting vines. Conventional wisdom asserted Tasmania was too cool for viticulture. ‘Apples and pears, Mr Alcorso,’ said one Ag Department official.

Conor van der Reest

Moorilla Pinot Noir on lyre trellis, vintage 2022. Photo: Peter Mueller

“The old Riesling had gone before I arrived in 2007. Moorilla’s celebrated Gewürztraminer (clone 48) was replaced by Pinot Noir about eight years ago. The vineyard is almost all Pinot Noir now, with the exception of 0.4ha Riesling I helped plant by the entrance.

Viticulture ‘challenging’

“Viticulture here is challenging. Our soils are pretty diverse. We have four metres and more of deep, silty clay. But there’s also risen siltstone bedrock on only a few centimetres of sand. Those growing conditions not only bring massive differences in vine size, vigour and fruit composition, they result in significant yield differences. “We’re always among the first to harvest in the Derwent Valley. Pinot Noir usually comes off around the middle of March, and we work hard to tailor our handpicking to avoid everything coming in at once. Harvest this year took around three weeks. That included fruit from our northern vineyard. That’s the shortest vintage I can remember here.” ‘The quest for the varieties best suited to our place, the optimum spacing, the best trellising, the correct level of pruning proved to be a long one — more than 20 years,’ Claudio Alcorso observed during his last decade on the property. Canadian-trained van der Reest is awestruck by the results Alcorso and his winemaker son Julian achieved during their 37 years of vineyard development. The pair may have made plenty of sound decisions along the way, but chance also played its part. Chris Harrington arrived at Moorilla in the 1970s to take on a day’s gardening for Lesley Alcorso. Before long, he was planting vines, bringing lofty ideas down to earth. By 1983, Harrington was Moorilla’s full-time vineyard manager, chasing his own dreams. When Alcorso joined the State Committee of Australia’s premier scientific and research organisation in the mid-60s, he met Dr Don Martin, officer-in-charge of CSIRO Hobart. Martin was a botanist by training, a true believer in Tasmania’s potential for cool climate wine production5.

CSIRO collaboration

He arranged for CSIRO’s horticultural research station at Merbein to install instrumentation at Moorilla to monitor growing conditions and vine behaviour. The project lasted five years. Importantly, it appeared to confirm Alcorso’s assertions that Moorilla’s climate was indeed similar to some wine regions of northern Europe. Collaboration also enabled CSIRO researchers to assess the performance of a range of cool climate grape varieties and clonal selections that were not wellsuited to Victoria’s warm Murray Valley. Martin gradually assumed the role of winemaker for the small family company, calling on the support of not only CSIRO but the skills and expertise of wine industry professionals like Dr Bryce Rankine. With Julian Alcorso at the helm in the 1980s, consultative roles

Winemaker Conor van der Reest assessing Moorilla wine. Photo: MONA/Jesse Hunniford

fell into the hands of a new generation of highly trained and experienced professionals, including the late Dr Tony Jordan. During the same decade, the property received numerous visits from established mainland producers as well as international luminaries like Professor Maynard Amerine (USA) and Dr Walter Eggenberger (Switzerland). Early Moorilla wine quality was helped in no small way by Martin’s periodic sojourns at wine research institutes located in Canada, Germany and the USA. Meanwhile, Claudio and Lesley Alcorso had the good fortune of being in Bordeaux in 1979 when Professor Alain Carbonneau released the results of his ten-year study of vineyard trellising. Moorilla thus became the first commercial vineyard in Australia to adopt the French researcher’s innovative ‘lyre system’. In little more than a decade, the distinctive U-shaped trellising was lending support to new clones of Pinot Noir.

D5V12 (2051), MV6 and the Swiss Wädenswil and Mariafeld selections were early introductions. Others like Dijon 113, 114 and 115 had somewhat uncertain or clandestine origins. In the early 2000s, clone 777 joined Moorilla’s Pinot Noir fraternity. Riesling selections across the decades have included the McWilliams clone and perhaps GM198 (0011) and GM239 (0012). Moorilla’s commitment to lyre trellising helped usher in industry moves to high density plantings, especially on Pinot Noir sites. Vine spacings of around 1.2 metres by 1.5 metres may have been ground-breaking at the time but made precision viticulture a feature of daily life in the vineyard. Mechanisation was hampered by the lack of access to — or availability of — technology that could combine laboursaving with effectiveness. The restricted working area between and under vines often required work crews to attend to weeding, shooting-positioning and leaf-plucking on foot and by hand. Ineffective spray penetration could allow unwanted plant growth among vine trunks and between leaf canopies. Ultra-low fruiting zones made harvesting uncomfortable for pickers and allowed bunches to become easy targets for marauding rabbits and nearby populations of ducks. Today, Moorilla is a jewel in the Tasmanian wine crown. It’s not one Walsh will allow to become tarnished during his reign over the company, says Conor van der Reest.

Vineyard managers Peter Mueller (Moorilla) and Jesse Graffam (St Matthias) cherish the 60-year legacy bestowed upon them by Claudio Alcorso. “If MONA is irreverent, Moorilla will always be reverent,” says van der Reest.

References

1. Tourism Tasmania Tasmanian Visitor Data, year ending December 2019. 2. Australian Bureau of Statistics Census 2016: Tasmania.

3. The Wind You Say. 1993. C. Alcorso, Harper Collins. 4. Hobart Botanical Gardens - www. bom.gov.au/climate/data/ 5. Dr Don Martin. 2003. State Library South Australia, Digital Collections, Oral History.

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