WINE CELLAR
WINES AU NATUREL Brisbane’s Doug Woodward is taking a natural approach to wine making … and producing amazing wines in the process. WORDS TONY HARPER I’M UNSURE if it should be called advancement or regression; let’s just call it change. But it has happened so quickly and definitively – it has taken over the hearts and minds of so many wine drinkers – I think it is here to stay. I’m talking about the mushrooming quantity of lo-fi, primitively made wines that have become such a passion for younger wine drinkers, jaded professionals and folk merely wanting something
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different in their wine glass: orange wines, field blends, the grubby and the clean, the un-reared, unfiltered, unrefined; the hippies of the wine world in all of their funky, often smelly glory. Thirty years ago it was home brewers challenging the might of beer brands Castlemaine and Carlton. Today it is guys and girls in their garage taking on Penfolds.
Enter Doug Woodward. A man who is definitely clean and sanitised, but who – in the north-west suburbs of Brisbane – makes wine on a micro-scale without a laboratory, a winery, a vineyard, a staff. Lo-fi for sure, but primitive only in terms of production. He produces perhaps the brightest, most energetic wines I’ve ever tasted; unpolished but incredibly exuberant. Just like himself. A father of three now grown-up boys, Doug is perhaps best known via his wife Jenny who, for the past 35 years, has been the weather presenter for the ABC News. Theirs is a marriage that catalysed the labels for Doug’s wines – Wedded to the Weather (get it?) and Cloud Project: odes to Jenny. But it’s not all about Jenny; Doug is a wonderful character, fond of bright shirts and chatter, prone to breaking into song at random, passionate, cheerful, and most of all an optimist; equal parts whacky and wonderful. A man who would carve his own path with or without his storm-riding wife. And he is a dab hand at winemaking. I guess it’s that optimism that allowed him to make the leap from working in a wine store, watching folk buy all sorts of odds and ends made by people of varying degrees of talent, to producing his own wines. It began as a hobby and has now become a business that stretches across the states and major cities of Australia. 2017 was the year for the first wine, a pet’ nat’ under the Wedded to the Weather label. It was made by Mike Hayes (currently Chief Winemaker at Sirromet, but then at Symphony Hill) with Doug an avid apprentice, from Gewurztraminer grapes sourced from the incredible Topper’s Mountain vineyard in northern New South Wales (and sadly ravaged by bushfires in 2019). These days Doug makes his own pet’ nat’s and still wines from an increasingly whacky array of varieties. He does them with a minimal amount of fuss: grapes, yeast, wine. Sadly, it may be a few years before Topper’s Mountain recovers enough to provide some more Gewurztraminer for Doug’s projects, or for their own.
