All Apsley gorgeous

The air is filled with the rich sweet aromas of dark chocolate and ripe berries – raspberries, black cherries, and plums. And like the tidal waters of nearby Waub's Gulch, they ebb and flow with the gentle movements of a late afternoon sea breeze, mingling with the soft spicy fragrances of French oak barrels. 

There's nothing quite like the smell of a winery at vintage time, says Bicheno winemaker Brian Franklin. Uniquely perfumed and intoxicating, it permeates the site of the former fish factory long before juice from his freshly harvested Apsley Gorge Vineyard Pinot Noir has been fermented and made into wine.

Franklin has spent six vintages working here, and believes he is no less sensitised to the smell than when he first turned his hands to winemaking back in 1998. In fact, he says these days he has a better nose for wine than he's ever had, thanks to his mates Jean-Marie Fourrier and Phillipe Charlopin.

However, neither has ever set a foot on the crazed concrete flooring of the place once used to process abalone and rock lobster for markets in south-east Asia and the Pacific rim. That's hardly surprising. You wouldn't expect this part of Tasmania's sunny East Coast to be a regular stamping ground for two of Burgundy's finest winemakers.

Instead, Franklin leaves his modest harbour-side premises each September and heads off to the famous French wine town of Gevrey-Chambertin to take part in what has become something of an annual pilgrimage for the ex-fisherman and abalone diver.

It's been that way for a few years now. He first arrived at Domaine Fourrier as a cellar hand in 2000. Only 2001 has broken his back-to-back sequence of Burgundy vintages. Come September, he'll be winging his way across the world with his family as usual, on a 26-hour journey to make wine in Pinot Noir's ancestral home. These days, he's ensconced at Domaine Charlopin – literally on the other side of the road from Fourrier's establishment – and his stay there will last for around two months. He expects it to be followed by subsequent vintage sojourns well into the foreseeable future.

Franklin keeps a diary containing notes about the grapes and wines he's tasted in the region, together with the range of practices he's witnessed in its vineyards and wineries. His generous hosts make no bones about sharing their knowledge and skills with the Antipodean flying winemaker. Far removed from their traditional commercial market places, and producing wine that is different in aroma, flavour and structure, Franklin is not regarded as any kind of threat to their ultimate success or exalted status.

"Every time I go back to Burgundy, I learn more and more about winemaking from the people I work with and those I'm introduced to while I'm there," he says. "Now that I've been a few times, I'm readily accepted as one of the team."

For anyone unconnected with the realities of life in Tasmania's small, quality-driven wine industry, that must seem an odd admission from a knockabout bloke on the wrong side of 50. But to the man behind award-winning AGV wines that fetch close to $50 at his cellar door, it beats working vintage in warmer sites on mainland Australia.

"A lot of Australian winemakers think you need to go to New Zealand or to Oregon in the States if you want to learn how to make Chardonnay and Pinot Noir wines," he explains. "But I've always taken the view that if you really want to learn how it's done, you have to go to where they make the greatest Chardonnay and Pinot Noir wines in the world – Burgundy.

"Perhaps the language differences put a lot of winemakers off doing that, but not enough make the effort to try to learn French. That's a shame. They're producing the best wines in the world over there. They always have, and I think they always will."

Franklin believes Burgundy's success is all due to a natural advantage it holds over the rest of the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir-producing world. The hillside slopes that make up France's fabled Côte d'Or region comprise a complex patchwork of poor rocky soils, each with their own unique orientations to the sun and the elements. Vines grown in the tiny family-owned vineyards that dot the landscape hereabouts produce wines with singular personalities, each reflecting various aspects of their origins in their distinctive aromas and flavours.

The French have a special word for it that has no equivalent form in the English language. They call it 'terroir.'

Generations of Burgundy producers like the Fourriers and Charlopins have toiled on the slopes, and they have a heightened awareness of the legacies that have been passed on to them by their forebears.

To outsiders like Franklin, their concept of terroir seems both mystical and mystifying. You have to live and work a number of vintages in a single region like Gevrey-Chambertin in order to be able to develop a sound understanding of the role it plays in determining centuries-old winemaking practices.

He says it's essentially viticultural skill and respect for the environment that underpins the quality of wine produced here. Not New World laboratory techniques like measuring pH or levels of total acidity.

"The Fourriers and Charlopins are excellent viticulturists, first and foremost," says Franklin. "They're very conscious of their soils and the need to maintain a naturally healthy environment in which their vines can grow. You don't find them putting on heaps of chemicals like superphosphates or chasing big yields from the vineyard like producers do in many parts of the world. They're basically doing here what their families have always done."

Domaine Charlopin may be at the cutting edge of wine being produced today in Gevrey-Chambertin but family patriarch Phillipe Charlopin still makes use of a draughthorse on slopes where employing a tractor would be either too dangerous or likely to degrade the vineyard site.

"Phillipe often says to me it's the winemaking that's the easy part," Franklin admits. "I always say, 'well, it is for you if you've got 60 to 80 year old vines and you've got the best Pinot Noir sites in the world like Chambertin and Clos Vougeot to work with. Without advantages like those, winemaking is much more difficult for me because I've got to really work hard to get quality and complexity into my wines.' "

Owning a modest nine hectares of vineyards in and around Gevrey-Chambertin, Jean-Marie Fourrier and his family are counted among those with relatively large landholdings in the region. The French tradition of passing on to surviving family members tracts of land owned by the head of an estate more commonly results in the division of sites into areas measurable by the number of vines there rather than the number of hectares.

Ancient gnarled vines – many of them approaching 100 years of age – are the most highly prized assets a family can possess in this hub of the Pinot Noir-producing world. Indeed, neither Jean-Marie Fourrier nor Phillipe Charlopin will make wines that bear the name of their family estates until the age of their vineyards reaches a minimum of 35 years. Grapes picked from younger vines are invariably sold on the open market, or made into less grand wines for sale to merchants in the region.

"Producers like Jean-Marie reckon vines need a minimum of 35 years to naturally de-vigour and produce the kind of quality fruit that gives the best expression of vineyard terroir," says Franklin.

That must provide faint hope for world-beating quality from the five hectares of vines Apsley Gorge Vineyard now boasts after the initial plantings of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir were established some 15 years ago.

For the most part, Franklin and his clients are prepared to live with any minor shortcomings they detect in his AGV wines. When his vineyard was hit by more than 280mm of near-torrential rain last autumn, his fallback position was effective if unsophisticated by Burgundy standards. Rather than make poor quality wine, with the help of a giant excavator, Franklin dug a large hole in the ground near his vineyard site and buried 25 tonnes of Chardonnay fruit that had suffered the ravages of disease-infection brought on by the weather.

So much for East Coast terroir, you might say.

Franklin takes a different view. He believes that somewhere locked up deep within the hungry soils of his East Coast vineyard might be the ultimate key to AGV's success. He admits overseas experience suggests he may have to wait a while before he finds any conclusive evidence that he's correct. He's in no hurry for results.

Right now, his Tasmanian Pinot passion is a gamble based on little more than hunch. There's no doubt the stakes are high, but Franklin just might be the man to reap their rich rewards. After all, he has a nose for these things.

First published Winter 2004 issue: Tasmania 40° South