Yalumba: ‘New varieties are hard to sell, not hard to make’
Complete with its own vine nursery in the Barossa, Yalumba-owner Hill-Smith Family Estates has all the resources to trial new grape varieties to combat climate change. The problem, says head of sustainability Louisa Rose, is the consumer. Eloise Feilden reports.
Hill-Smith Family Estates, now a sixth-generation family-run business, owns and operates wineries across Australia and New Zealand including Yalumba, Oxford Landing and Jansz Tasmania.
Louisa Rose, while not a member of the family, is at the heart of the business. “I’ve never worked anywhere else,” she admits, having joined Yalumba in 1992 and worked with the family as winemaker for more than three decades. Her current title, winemaker and head of sustainability, sees her spread the word about Australian wine and sustainability all over the world, and she is a board member of International Wineries for Climate Action (IWCA).
Rose isn’t one to mince her words when it comes to climate change. “The assumption that there is going to be a wine industry for us to be part of in 50 years is a big assumption,” she states.
The stakes are high. And for a family-run business like Hill-Smith Family Estates, the impact hits close to home. “That’s why we’re working so hard,” she says, “because we want the sixth, seventh and eighth generation of the family to have a business if they want to.”
Working for a family business has its benefits when it comes to making change happen. Hill-Smith Family Estates has its own vine nursery, meaning its winemakers have the “opportunity to propagate up, quite quickly, enough new vines to plant a vineyard”.
The company has “done a lot of trials with different varieties over the years”, including some Italian grapes. “”Probably the first new variety we were talking about and looking at specifically for a warmer climate was Vermentino,” she says, noting that it was a wine “we worked on for a long time and made a lot of”.
Despite the dedication, “we just couldn’t get it out there and get people to like it”.
Launching new varieties can be hit or miss. Yalumba had breakout success with Viognier in the 1990s after planting Australia’s first commercial Viognier vineyard a decade earlier, at a time when the grape was close to extinction.
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“You just don’t know why some varieties take off and some don’t,” she says. And investing time and funds into their propagation is always a risk, despite the process itself being simple. “New varieties are hard to sell, but not hard to make,” she adds.
Rose argues that the difficulty lies with consumers: “Australians, particularly, might talk about being adventurous, but when it comes to drinking wine, they stick to five varieties like glue.”
Developing new varieties in south Australia is all well and good, but the process is pointless if the wines don’t sell. Faced with incurious consumers, Hill-Smith Family Estates focuses on better equipping already popular varieties with the tools to survive as temperatures rise.
Yalumba has done a lot of work with drought-resistant rootstocks, Rose says. “We’ve never had phylloxera in South Australia, luckily, but rootstock is really important for us for drought resistance.”
She has also adapted methods of trellising and the use of kaolin clay to protect vines from intense sunlight and provide the grapes with enough shade.
“We have Grenache in the Barossa, which is one of the most heat-tolerant varieties, and doing beautifully at the moment,” she says. “The varieties themselves are not my biggest concern.”
What worries her most, then? “Not having enough water for people to live with and grow food, that’s more of a concern,” she says. Winemakers will continue to find ways to adapt to rising temperatures, but their ability to do so depends on bigger questions around climate change; questions of food security and population size.
“There’s expected to be another two billion people on the planet by 2050,” she says, citing United Nations forecasts. Predictions like this pose essential questions for the wine industry, and ones which Rose is continuously looking at: “Will our land be needed for food? Will we have enough water to irrigate food as well as vines? They’re the things we need to look at.”
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