Liquid Gold

GROWING GRAPES ON FORMER GOLD-MINING CLAIMS HAS HELPED PRODUCE SOME 24-KARAT WINES FROM DOMAIN ROAD VINEYARD.

“We always used to tell people there’s bound to be a little bit of gold in every bottle, especially in the Pinot Noir, as that’s grown on those gold-bearing gravels,” laughs Graeme Crosbie, who owns Domain Road Vineyard in Bannockburn, Central Otago, with wife Gillian.

The “Dunedin-born and bred” couple have a lifelong connection to the area.

“Bannockburn is a place that independently both our families have had some sort of contact with over the years,” says Graeme.

His great-grandfather built gold dredges up in the Nevis, while Gillian’s mother was a teacher at the local school for a time. They have owned a house in Bannockburn for more than 30 years, and holidayed there for many years prior to that.

Fascinated by the growth of vineyards and the wines they produced, when an old apricot orchard in nearby Domain Road came up for sale, the pair decided to try their hand at developing their own vineyard.

“Gillian and I had a long interest in wine, and with our connection to the area, it really came about as a meeting of those two things, in that the wine industry moved to Bannockburn and we had the interest and the opportunity to purchase into a property – with some other people originally but we eventually bought everybody out and have been running it ourselves for over 10 years now,” says Graeme.

The now tiny settlement of Bannockburn was an important and bustling town during the gold rush of the 1860s. Domain Road Vineyard overlooks an historic area known as ‘The Sluicings’ where stunning land formations are a legacy of the gold mining activity.

The environmental devastation created by the early gold miners, who literally washed away entire hillsides while sluicing for gold, has inadvertently been a godsend for growing grapes. It left behind good quality loam over free-draining schist gravel and pipeclay, popular with the early miners for making tobacco pipes. Both of these, along with the climate, which provides hot summers and cold winters, make for excellent wine-producing grapes.

Domain Road’s Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling grapes thrive on the section of the vineyard land that was once mined for gold, while their Pinot Noir grows on land undisturbed by gold mining activity.

“The Domain Road vineyard actually has three titles, but the title where the Pinot Noir is, the person that owned that didn't actually mine on that site, he was a gold miner elsewhere, which meant that the largest area of that particular vineyard was never actually worked for gold,” explains Graeme. “So it has its original gravels and soils on the top, which is quite important for Pinot Noir.

“There will be gold there, there’s gold pretty much everywhere in Bannockburn” says Graeme. “Where the vineyards are is very, very fine gold, it would take a lot to extract it and would ruin the vineyard.”

When the global financial crisis hit the industry in 2009, the Crosbies might have been tempted to start digging under the vines for gold nuggets, but instead went against the mood of the moment by purchasing a second block of land to develop into vines.

Graeme and Gillian Crosbie with vineyard dog Lucy

“We saw an opportunity to look around our region to see if there was any other land available that we could expand into, and we found a bare piece of land on Felton Road that hadn’t been developed, of very good quality, and we were fortunate enough to purchase that,” says Graeme.

“It was a difficult time in the wine industry and people were either meeting those challenges with downsizing, selling land or trying to produce more entry level and cheaper wines, which I never saw as being a direction for us.” “We were really swimming against the tide of the times, so we came up with the name ‘Defiance’ for the new vineyard – we were defiantly going where no one else wanted to tread at the time.”

This trailblazing ‘defiance’ is a key point of difference for Domain Road Vineyard.

“I think it’s our determination as well to just be producing at the premium level, the premium end of winemaking, so even our estate wine is not an entry-level wine, and none of our wines are,” says Graeme. “There are a few people still doing this in Central Otago, but it’s becoming fewer and fewer, most have some sort of entry level Pinot Noir especially now, it just seems to be the way of it.”

“Pinot Noir is the main wine of our region, and I guess another point of difference for us is that only 50 percent of our plantings are Pinot Noir, whereas others can be anything from maybe 70 to 100 percent.

“Gillian and I have always had a fairly wide palate of wine that we like and so we’ve produced 10 wines out of 14 hectares, so it’s quite a number, it’s a little bit unusual.”

The Domain Road vineyard

Despite having only half their vineyards planted in Pinot Noir, Graeme says the wines produced from it are still their “standouts”. “We do three Pinot Noir wines not including a Rosé, which is also 100 percent Pinot Noir – two single vineyards and then Bannockburn Pinot Noir which is a blend of grapes from both vineyards.

“The next one for us is Chardonnay, a newer wine, but it's one I've always liked – we didn't plant it originally because in the early 2000s there was a move against Chardonnay and it was very hard to sell, so we actually planted Riesling instead.

“And Riesling is also a variety I guess would be next in line for me, because we produce some really excellent Rieslings. We think our Riesling has an interesting point of difference because of that gold-mined land it grows on.”