Moorooduc Estate: Producer profile
Sarah Ahmed, Decanter Premium, August 19, 2023
This family estate in Australia’s Mornington Peninsula was one of the first to realise the region’s potential for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Sarah Ahmed discovers its love of flirting with ‘dangerous’ techniques and updates her previous recommendations with some new releases, including the 2021s, a vintage which really shone.
Australia is known for flying winemakers and flying doctors. It also has a distinguished tradition of high-flying winemaker doctors: form early settlers Dr Christopher Penfold and Dr Henry Lindeman whose names live on in famous wine estate, to Margaret River’s modern pioneers, Drs Cullity (Vasse Felix), Cullen (Cullen), Pannell (Moss Wood) and others.
And Dr Richard McIntyre of Moorooduc Estate, who planted one of Mornington Peninsula’s earliest vineyards in 1983 and is today known for being at the forefront of cool-climate viticulture.
Pragmatism brought McIntyre to Victoria’s southernmost maritime region. Being within an hour’s drive of Melbourne allowed the avid collector of Australian wine to pursue (and self-finance) a desire to make wine, while still practicing surgery
But there was a certain serendipity too, which started a decade earlier.
During a four-year stint as a registrar in Oxford in the 1970s, while studying for a PhD in Medical Science, McIntyre discovered Old World wine, particularly Burgundy. The young doctor fell in love with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.
By 1980, when McIntyre returned to Australia, it was still early days for home-grown Chardonnay; Pinot Noir was embryonic. Undeterred, in 1983 McIntyre planted both grapes form the outset (albeit only two rows of Pinot Noir). Fast forward to today and both varieties have become synonymous with Moorooduc Estate and Mornington Peninsula as a whole.
Putting down roots
McIntyre believes his scientific background has served Moorooduc Estate well, over and above an understanding of wine chemistry. It encouraged him to ‘ask questions, try to find answers – especially by trial and observation – share knowledge and collaborate with others, even if they were competitors’.
And he was in good company. Civil engineer and oenology graduate Nat White has planted Main Ridge Estate in 1976, making his first wines in 1980, while nurseryman Garry Crittenden (Crittenden Estate) has acquired a vineyard in the same year. They became McIntyre’s mentors.
Crittenden’s belief in the potential of northern Mornington encouraged McIntyre to put down roots in the Moorooduc district in 1982. Based on incorrect weather data (which suggested the climate was too warm for Pinot Noir) both planted Cabernet Sauvignon, as had White. However, even though the peninsula itself is regarded as marginal, the warmer, drier north and Moorooduc Estate’s northwest-facing aspect made sense for late-ripening Cabernet Sauvignon.
McIntyre’s eldest daughter Kate recalls fond childhood memories of accompanying her father to the vineyard every Saturday after his hospital rounds, listening to The Goon Show on the car radio. Other than an annual ski trip the family spent holidays at the vineyard, with McIntyre taking a month off surgery at harvest. But the Moorooduc property tugged at the heartstrings of the then 53-year-old McIntyre and in 2000 he, wife Jill and their young family left Melbourne to relocate to Mornington permanently.
Nat White made the McIntyres’ first vintage in 1986 – a single barrel of Cabernet Sauvignon. McIntyre began making the wines with his mentor’s help once a winery was completed in 1987. Describing White’s training as ‘super safe’ (the Australian tradition), the pair began to deviate from the script.
‘Dangerous’ techniques
Adopting what McIntyre calls ‘dangerous’ techniques, they started extending macerations, naturally fermenting and leaving wines unsulphered over the winter to undergo spontaneous malolactic fermentations.
Daughter Kate – who became a Master of Wine in 2010 – recalls the reaction of James Halliday to wild ferments. “isn’t it terribly risky?’ Aistralia’s foremost wine critic asked her. This was around the millennium; only in the past decade have wild ferments become commonplace for Australia’s top Chardonnays. (Perhaps the sourdough bread McIntyre bakes for the cellar door every Saturday got him ahead of the curve?)
Dangerous deviations and innovative experimentations had successfully enhanced the wines of Moorooduc Estate, and others followed their lead. With savoury nuance, texture and payers to balance the region’s intense fruit and high natural acidity, the world-class potential of Mornington Peninsula’s Chardonnay and Pinot Noir was becoming evident.
Encourage to focus on these varieties by Kate (now working in the family business), McIntyre not only planted the rest of the vineyard with them but, in 2006, head-grafted the Cabernet Sauvignon over to Pinot Noir too. These planting enabled McIntyre to explore the broader selection of Burgundian clones as well as New Zealand’s Abel clone which had become available, allowing him to build more layers and texture in the wines.
Another way was to explore different sites. Having increased the capacity of the winery tenfold in 2001, McIntyre began sourcing fruit from other vineyards. In addition he made small-batch wines for clients, notably Ten Minutes by Tractor (from 1999 to 2016).
Vineyards and wines
Mornington Peninsula’s diverse terroir includes lower sites on the north’s sedimentary soils and cooler, higher sites on southern volcanic soils which typically ripen two to three weeks later. The impact of cooling airflows differs, depending on the undulating topography and exposure to Port Phillip Bay to the west, Bass Strait to the south or Western Port Bay to the east.
It was gratifying, says McIntyre, to discover that working with multiple vineards of similar age, similarly managed and planted to the same clone ‘confirmed the importance of terroir in the production of high-quality wine in our part of the world’.
In 2010, he restructured the range, introducing top-tier, single-vineyard Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays from the McIntyre, Robinson and Garden (Pinot Noir only) vineyards.
The Estate range has become a vineyard blend; principally McIntyre for the Chardonnay plus some Robinson, while the Estate Pinot Noir is typically equal parts McIntyre, Robinson and Garden vineyards. In the past, declassified fruit went into second label, Devil Bend Creek. But for about 10 years it was mainly sourced from the Osborn family’s vineyard, for whole McIntyre had made wine. Moorooduc Estate also makes small amounts of Shiraz and Piont Gris.
Discussing the estate’s evolution with McIntyre during a visit in 2010, I learned about his pride and joy – a gravity-fed ‘Heath Robinson Tower of Power’ rigged up to protect his hand-picked Pinot Noir. I also learned about the errors. He admitted searching for more length and intensity than was appropriate in young vines, then picking too ripe and using too much (up to 50%) new oak. Today he pick earlier – also because the climate is warmer – and uses less new oak: the 2016s have 25%: the 2018s, 20%. It integrates exceptionally well in the single-vineyard wines.
Balance and tannins
Despite the earlier picking, Moorooduc’s Chardonnays don’t compare with Australia’s new-wave lean and mineral examples, which are harvested earlier still and often made without malolactic fermentation or batonnage. McIntyre’s Chardonnays – and Pinots – are weightier, with flavoursome, supple fruit and savoury, textural layers. They also have beautiful balance: the Chardonnays with firm acidity and surprisingly low alcohol; the Pinot Noirs with ample savoury tannins.
‘We love tannin,’ enthuses Kate, who has been the estate’s marketing manager since 2004 but also gets involved in winemaking. ‘As vine age increases, we see more tannin structure – to an unusual degree for New World Pinot Noir.’
The stately tannins as an authoritative but unshowy presence in all the Pinots – destemmed, apart from the Garden Vineyard cuvee. It is the only wine to undergo 100% whole-bunch fermentation because it is the only Pinot from a mono-clonal vineyard. The MV6 clone can produce quite foursquare wines, so whole-bunch fermentation brings ‘stemmy’ complexity, with a spiralling, dynamic tannin structure. It’s proof that McIntyre is still happy to flirt with ‘dangerous’ techniques. As is Kate, who describes Moorooduc’s Pinot Gris on Skins as ‘my baby’.
Since falling in love with the wines of Burgundy more than 40 years ago, Richard McIntyre’s intellectual curiosity, force of logic and touch of the maverick has tested and trounced the theory ‘that one was wasting one’s time planting Pinot Noir outside the Cote d’Or; that Pinot noir ‘did not travel’.
The 2021 vintage
2021 at Moorooduc Estate was blessed with a mild, gentle season with rain events throughout, resulting in excellent fruit set, very little vine stress and a paced ripening of fruit.
The mild conditions highlighted the different microclimates in the Moorooduc vineyards, with vintage beginning at the normal time (around the 22nd February), but with little pressure on the winery as different sites and varieties ripened slowly, extending harvest out to late March across our vineyards in the north of the peninsula.
The result: a calm harvest, a composed winery team and bright, vivid wines with beautiful natural acidity, and fine phenolics, weaving structure tightly together.
Lovers of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from Burgundy and beyond will find much to admire in Moorooduc Estate’s wines.