57 Wines Au Naturel

WINES AU NATUREL

Brisbane’s Doug Woodward is taking a natural approach to wine making … and producing amazing wines in the process.

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 WORDS TONY HARPER 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.

I’ll pause for a moment to talk about pet’ nat’ (AKA pettilant naturel ... naturally sparkling).

Basically, these are sparkling wines (sometimes prickly like mineral water, other times gushing like a fountain) made by stuffing the wines into the bottle a heartbeat before they have finished ferment.

The fizz is from the carbon dioxide created by fermentation.

No additions, no fiddling, as simple as can be.

Sometimes they are wonderful, sometimes they are woeful, and always they are primal.

They have no room or time for being polished and massaged.

Their taste is as transparent as a wine can possibly be.

Doug’s have always been beautifully precocious and bright, clean, bone dry, theatrical.

These days he makes what is most likely Australia’s best Fernao Pires (a Portuguese white grape) simply because there is little or no competition.

But even if there was competition, I have no doubt it would stand tall.

It’s a terrific wine – exuberant, rich, almost a vinous extension of its maker (possibly about to burst into song) with oodles of texture (it’s almost slippery) and flavours that could be likened to feijoa, guava, even mango at a pinch.

Definitely tropical.

He makes several pet’ nat’s, some white, some coloured, but all of them from lesser-known varieties; Vermentino, Prieto Picudo, Montepulciano, Touriga Nacional, Aglianico, Picudo ...

And he makes still wines which are plush ... fruit forward, perhaps simple.

But if you believe the wine lore that talks of variety and site being the most important characters of a wine, it’s hard to think of any others that can close the gap as succinctly as these.

What Doug doesn’t do is allow oak into his regime: these are all very direct translations of the grapes from which they were made and the place in which those grapes were grown.

Part of that decision is no doubt fuelled by the size of his operation – barrels are expensive, they take up space and require plenty of management – but the inclusion of oak would mar Doug’s wines ... add an element that sits between the grape and the glass.

For people who drink conventional wines – Barossa Shiraz, Coonawarra Cabernet, Margaret River Chardonnay – it is quite a leap of faith to venture into the world of pet nat’s and skinsy whites.

But if someone were to ask me the easiest, safest bridge to cross that chasm, I’d say Doug Woodward and his wines are the way to go.

The trick lies in finding them.

Jenny & Doug Woodward

We go further.

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TOP DROPS

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Special shine

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