Episode 4
· 52:38
How is the hidden thing revealed? The theology of wine, it's a miracle. You've you've got a hidden thing. It's beautiful at one level, but then you ferment it and nurture it and cherish it through that period and be very careful about how you do it. And a whole new level of beauty and dignity and power and grandeur is revealed.
Tim Kirk:And you find yourself smelling a glass which your only response is, wow. That is amazing. If you smelled a glass of grape juice, you'd think, well, that's okay. You smell a glass of Romney Conte, La Tache 1978 Alright. Or a L'Am All In 1990, and it's as a holy level of wow.
Tim Kirk:Like, something has been revealed through that process, which is awe inspiring.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Hey, everybody. In this episode, I sit down with Tim Kirk, chief winemaker at Klonakilla Winery in the Canberra district of Australia. This conversation was a masterclass in perseverance, creativity, and the kind of serendipity that can lead to a wine so special it changes the world. It was also a moving exploration of the deeper meaning and beauty that wine can hold, a reminder that in the right hands, wine can speak to the soul. Here's my conversation with Tim Kirk.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Thank you so much for being here, Tim.
Tim Kirk:It's a joy. Thanks, Alex.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I'm really excited for this conversation. Your father planted Guanaquilla's first vines in 1971. Yeah. What are some of your earliest memories of playing in the vineyards and helping out with the family winery?
Tim Kirk:Well, I have memories, certainly, because I what was I then? I was four years old. I was born in '67. So it's it's in the reachable memory just. And I remember the year that we bought my dad bought the farm as we called it.
Tim Kirk:And my grandparents on my mother's side were visiting from The UK, and we went out to see the farm. And I remember sitting around the dam and thinking about this mysterious country that we were now sort of sitting in, surrounded by some gum trees and pastures and sheep. And then this was the place dad was determined to establish a vineyard. So I do remember. And then, of course, as I went through my childhood years, mom and dad had six kids, all boys, and I was the fourth of them.
Tim Kirk:And my younger brother, Jeremy, he's the fifth. He and I used to love going out with dad on weekends to the farm. My dad was a scientist during the week. He was a very smart guy. He worked for the CSIRO, which is the Australian Government Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.
Tim Kirk:But on the weekend, he'd leave the science behind it. We head out to the winery, and Jeremy and I would give dad a hand. Maybe give him a hand. I'm not sure if we were more help or a nuisance. I'm not sure.
Tim Kirk:But banging in posts or planting some vines or running some wires, and it was a great memory, actually. It was a real adventure playground for us when we were kids, but it's been kind of in my consciousness and my subconsciousness since I was very young. It's kind of I I breathed in the production of wine and the planting of a vineyard and became part of who I am, really.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That's beautiful. And what was your dad's original vision for Clonakillo?
Tim Kirk:Well, it's interesting because he he had a lifelong love of wine, which had an interesting origin story. He's really Irish. He was born in England but to Irish parents and is very proud of his Irish heritage. But he was at boarding school in England for his years of education. And when he was a teenager, he would return from boarding school in the summer holidays.
Tim Kirk:And his parents, and particularly his mom, actually, my grandma, Ellen, she was quite the businesswoman, quite the entrepreneur. She'd grown up on a dairy farm in County Clare in the South Of Ireland, and she'd grown up like so many of those earlier generations, poor. Yeah. Now if you had a farm, you didn't starve. They had milk, and they had cream, and they had oats, and they could grow things and pigs and cows.
Tim Kirk:So they didn't starve, but they did know poverty. And there was a stack of them, this this Irish, these forebears of mine living in pretty small farmhouse. And she they knew poverty. And I think my grandmother Ellen's decision fairly early on when she married was that her children weren't gonna know the poverty that she knew. And she was a smart woman.
Tim Kirk:They were living in England initially after they married my grandparents, and she managed to purchase a clothing store from her family in the North Of England, not far from Manchester. And she was very good at it. She turned it in what had been a struggling shop into a very successful one. And then she sold that smaller shop and bought a larger one, and that continued to thrive. And and then the desire to move back to Ireland was growing.
Tim Kirk:So they moved back to Ireland, and they purchased not a clothing store this time, but a a hotel in County Clare. And she did that, and the Hydro Hotel grew and became much more successful. So that's where my dad returned in when he was a teenager, 14, 15 years of age. He'd returned from boarding school back to Ireland, and he'd be put to work in the family business, which was this majestic hotel, the Hydro. Yeah.
Tim Kirk:And his job was serving behind the bar and then also serving wine to the guests in the dining room, and he was good at it. He could do the talk and chat to the guests, and then his responsibilities grew to actually ordering the wine for the dining room. And so he thought, well, I better learn something about wine. So at the age of 15, he was starting to read such books and literature that were available to him about wine so that he could make good decisions about what he was gonna buy. Yeah.
Tim Kirk:So he had to get his head around all the complexities of Burgundy, the stratification of that extraordinary slope, the Golden Slope, the Cote D'Or, and all the amazing history of Burgundy and the tiny handkerchief parcels of vines and their great history and complex flavors and textures and aromas. Then get to get his head around Bordeaux, and then he had to understand champagne. And it became because he was a smart guy. But the idea of wine and the complexities of wine and the subtleties and the perfumes and the textures and the effect of landscape and the effect of weather and climate and soils and sunlight and wind direction that just became a fascination for him. He went on to study biochemistry at Cambridge.
Tim Kirk:He did a doctorate at Cambridge where he met my mom. He was also there in the doctoral program at Cambridge. And it amuses us, I think, because my dad tells me that the men outnumbered the women in the doctoral program at Cambridge 10 to one. Yeah. And he was my dad from Irish peasant stock, and he was found himself working in a lab next to this gorgeous English girl, an English rose from a middle upper class, more upper than middle family.
Tim Kirk:And somehow the Irish peasant managed to woo the the gorgeous English rose, and they got married in nineteen sixty, fifty nine, I think it was.
Alex Abbott Boyd:K.
Tim Kirk:And finished the when working in the scientific careers. And, of course, the university system in in England, as you might know, like, they have a a bit of a culture of wine drinking too, like some of the great colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. And they have pretty good cellars and some wonderful wines, usually old world wines from France, especially, Germany, other places in the cellars. And so dad occasionally got to partake of those wines with the professors.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Tim Kirk:So, of course, when he came to Australia we came here in 1968. He was basically headhunted by the CSIRO. They were looking for smart young scientists to come to Australia, and he came here and we settled in Canberra, which is capital of Australia, but it's inland. It's about two hours by car from the coast. It's we sit at 600 meters above sea level there.
Tim Kirk:So it's cooler, and it's continental. And he thought, well, why isn't there a wine industry here? This feels very European to me. And he did ask some of his CSIRO colleagues, about it, and they thought, oh, no. It's way too cool.
Tim Kirk:Because mostly in those days, in the fifties and sixties, Australian wine growing had been more a a warmer climate phenomenon. Mhmm. You you think of the Barossa Valley or the Hunter Valley or the Swan Valley. There was not so much cool climate viticulture then. So people thought it was too cool, but my dad thought otherwise.
Tim Kirk:And he did some research into the soils and the climate and found some distinct parallels to Bordeaux in terms of the temperature ranges and also the Northern Rhone Valley and thought, well, I'm gonna have a crack. And he did. He bought a newly subdivided a former finable growing property back in 1971, and we proceeded to plant our first finds. And we didn't know what was gonna do well.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Was he thinking it would just largely be a weekend hobby? Was he hoping to build a business out of it?
Tim Kirk:Well, he would say that he always hoped he could turn it into a business, but it was definitely like what we would call a shoestring operation. Yeah. He had a by '71, his sixth child had been born. Mom was a full time mom. Even though she had a doctorate in biochemistry, she was keen to be a full time mom at home.
Tim Kirk:So they had one income, then bought this property. I mean, let's be honest. Land prices are then then were much lower than they are these days, but it was a struggle. You know? So we built it up very slowly, and we we planted vines, as I said, in '71 and again in '72.
Tim Kirk:And we didn't know what was gonna do well, so dad planted a bit of a fruit salad vineyard. Like, there'd be a couple of rows of Riesling, a couple of rows of Cabernet, and then some Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay and Shiraz. We didn't didn't know what was gonna work. And Yeah. So it was in some ways, was a patchwork, a fruit salad, or even an experimental vineyard in some ways.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. But then we came up against the harsh Australian realities of climate because that first vineyard, three acres, he planted in '71. We lost at least two thirds of it to a drought in '72 and '73. So many of the things that we learned, we learned the hard way because he was the first to do it. And then there's probably, like, a 150 vineyards there now.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. But as I said, yeah, we learned through from our mistakes and piece by piece, very much a shoestring operation and but gradually got our act together and went from there from strength to strength.
Alex Abbott Boyd:You studied theology Yeah. And were working as a teacher. So what led you into the family wine business?
Tim Kirk:Yes. Indeed. I did study theology. Well, I I grew up with wine, as I said. It was always on the family dinner table, which I think is exactly the place it should be.
Tim Kirk:It was part of our culture. My my dad would have a couple of glasses of wine every night, and he did this. What I came to understand was an unusual thing. He used to take notes on what he was drinking. He had a little notebook, and he'd be making comments on the aroma and the flavors.
Tim Kirk:The family dinner? Yeah. Just kind briefly a couple of notes, and he'd put his notebook aside. So Yeah. We didn't know any difference, so we didn't understand that was slightly odd behavior.
Tim Kirk:But as a kid growing up myself, I wasn't particularly interested in wine. I loved the I loved the vineyard and loved the winery, but the taste of wine was not something I had really developed. Interestingly, but then I left home when I was 18, and I moved in with a bunch of other guys. There was a bunch of blokes. We were living in a household together, and it then dawned on me that it wasn't actually entirely normal or every day for wine to be on the table every night.
Tim Kirk:And in its absence, I found myself missing it even though I'd never paid much attention. I mean, dad would offer us a glass and we'd have a taste, but I never paid that much attention. But strangely, when it was absent, I missed it. Yeah. And then I started to get a bit more interested in myself and started to read a bit, and I went on to study theology.
Tim Kirk:It was my great passion, still is. And then Laura, my wife, and I got married in 1990, and we moved to Melbourne from Canberra. And Melbourne, as as I'm sure you know well, I do know if you know, Alex is sort of the center of a number of great wine regions. So you've got the Yarra Valley and then down south the Mornington Peninsula, or could head out to Geelong or a bit further west out to the Grampians and find magnificent expressions of cool climate Shiraz or Riesling or Pinot or Chardonnay or Yeah. Any number of interesting varieties and wonderful climate, wonderful place to be growing grapes and making wine.
Tim Kirk:So here we were living in Melbourne, newly married. I finished my diploma of education after I finished my theology degree so I can earn a living, and I was teaching at a big Jesuit school, a Catholic boys school. And on weekends, I dragged my poor bride, Lara. We'd be out in the Mornington Peninsula and tasting through wines at three or four wineries, and we'd head out to the Yarra Valley. I was so enthusiastic.
Tim Kirk:I'd been well and truly bitten by the wine bug by this stage. So I'd Yeah. Was passionate about it. I couldn't read enough about it. I couldn't taste enough.
Tim Kirk:I'd done a little bit of work in wine retail too while I was doing my degree, and so I'd I'd learned a lot through that experience too. Loved it. Loved it. You know what it's like when you first fall in love.
Alex Abbott Boyd:People of Melbourne are spoiled with the number of great wine regions and great wineries all around.
Tim Kirk:Of course. Wine is I love the French terroir concept about basically grapevines and wines are interpreters of landscape. They are the instruments through which the landscape is given a voice. So it's all about trying to hear the song of that particular landscape. So whether you I don't know how nerdy we wanna get on this podcast, Alex.
Alex Abbott Boyd:You can go as nerdy as you want.
Tim Kirk:Well, I mean, you know, if you're making Pinot Noir, for example, are you are you gonna go the domain or the Romney Conte route? Are you gonna use a 100% whole bunches? Or same with the Duchenne Dugiac. They do something like that. Far, you will.
Tim Kirk:If you're in Nick Far, you will. Or are you are you more influenced by the Rousseau School, which is the Henri Jaire School, which is a 100% distembed as do as much as you can to keep your berries intact but separated from the stalks? And, you know, I I have been far more than I have deserved in my life, Alex. I have been able to taste romelikonti and rousseau, and I love them both absolutely. Absolutely.
Tim Kirk:And one's 100% whole bunch, and one's a 100% destemmed, and they're both magic. So that's part of the romance of winemaking is trying to think your way through and feel your way through and experiment your way through, maybe using whole bunches with this parcel, less whole bunches with that parcel, natural feminine in this block, and a cultured yeast in that block, a little short maceration with this tank and a long maceration with that tank. Yeah. There's so many opportunities to experiment. I mean, it's like, you know, kids playing in a sand pitch, you know, like, you can build and dig and construct and knock down, and I had so much fun.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. So much fun through all those early years, and I was passionate about it and living in Melbourne. But being a school teacher, here's the trick. You get a break, like, in about April, another big break in July, another break in September, October, and I would be motoring up the freeway from Melbourne up to Canberra. It's about a seven and a half hour drive.
Tim Kirk:And I'd be in the vats working with my dad and learning about winemaking. And Yeah. The other thing that I was doing through that time was as has probably become apparent to everyone listening to us is that I don't mind the jibber jabber. I'm happy to talk, and I can talk and talk. So, you know, talking to people about wine and about what was special about our site and what we were doing and how we were doing it became something that I was very happy to do and very competent at doing.
Tim Kirk:And so the marketing side fell into my hands as well. So there I was. I was teaching religious education, and I was loving it. I was good at it. I was passionate about the subject.
Tim Kirk:But at the same time, I had this kind of parallel passion for wine and winemaking and reading everything I could read and talking to all the winemakers I could talk to and tasting everything I could taste. And Yeah. It eventually became a bit of a dream to come back and do it full time.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Okay. Just take a step back then, I'd love to get into the story of the Shiraz Viognier. Could you tell me a little bit about how Viognier came to be planted at Clonakilla?
Tim Kirk:That is an interesting question. So there we were, small family winery, what we used to call boutique winery. And this was, like, say, through the seventies, through the eighties, and then particularly into the nineties, the wine boom in Australia really took off. And so many people, and you can understand why because it's such a wonderful idea, had that exciting vision. Wouldn't it be great to be a winemaker?
Tim Kirk:Wouldn't it be great to have a vineyard? So in all of those wonderful cool climate areas, viticulture exploded. The Yarra Valley, Moynter Peninsula, Corridor is Victoria, as well as Koolaroo is of New South Wales where we are, which because we're bit further north, so to get the coolness, you have to go higher above sea level. So Canberra District, then also Orange. Tumbarumba.
Tim Kirk:Tumbarumba is higher than us. Hilltops is a little bit lower, still 500 meters above sea level. So all this was really taking off through the nineties, especially into the February. And, well, early on, actually, even earlier than in the eighties, when the boutique winery thing was really happening, my younger brother Jeremy, who was my partner in crime when we were kids going out to hang around with at the vineyard with my dad, he said when he was about 13, he said to my dad, why don't we try something that other people aren't doing? Let's see if we can find a great variety that we can kind of hang our hat on and make a thing of Yeah.
Tim Kirk:That it's a bit different. And my dad thought, well, this is that's actually pretty smart. Yeah. Smart lad. And he thought about it, and he looked into his viticultural texts and books off the shelf and thought about the climate and the soils and continentality that we have there at Murrenbateman near Canberra, and he thought about Viognier, he stumbled upon writing about the great Condrieuer wines.
Tim Kirk:And no one much. Maybe there was a handful, but virtually no one. Just a handful, literally. So Dan thought, well, let's have a go at Viognier. So he had been doing the wine science degree at Charles Sturt University, which is one of the places in Australia where if you really wanna get qualified in winemaking, you'd go to study.
Tim Kirk:And they have a nursery vineyard, and they had a couple of Viognier vines. So because he had associations, was studying there. He managed to get some cuttings. In '86, he managed to kind of cobble together enough of these puny little sticks of Viognier, which I have to say, that clone, which is Montpelier 1968, it's a very good clone in terms of the flavors it produces, but it's a very bad clone in terms of its virus loading. Okay.
Tim Kirk:Like, it's got at least five, probably six different viruses K. Which when you stack them on top of each other, means that the grapevine is gonna struggle, and it did struggle. And my dad, god bless him, planted these things in 1996 and then lovingly tended them year after year to grow up a string and then hit the cord and wire and then grow across the wire. It took them six years. Normally, you get a pretty decent crop at three or at least four years in Australian context, but these things took six years.
Tim Kirk:So that was '86. He planted them, lovingly tended to them for so long. In '91 so Lara, my wife, and I got married in 1990. In '91, we headed over to have a bit of a holiday in Europe. We were there for a number of weeks.
Tim Kirk:And because I'd worked in wine retail, I one of the guys I'd worked for is a small retailer. They're one of these fantastic small independent retailers who focus on really interesting wines, you know, higher end stuff. And these guys, Farmer Brothers, they imported Gigal, Cote Rotie, into Australia. And as I'm sure you listeners know, Alex Gigal is the biggest single producer of Cote Rotie and and very powerful producer and a wonderful producer in the Northern Rhone. And through that connection with Farmer Brothers, who I had worked for casually as a shop guy around the floor, I was able to get an introduction to go and see the Gigal family.
Tim Kirk:So we did that. Laura and I went there towards the end of '91 and had a wonderful tasting there. And then the high point towards the end of the tasting was tasting his very best, the single parcel cut rotis. There's three of them.
Alex Abbott Boyd:The la la.
Tim Kirk:The the la la's out of barrel. Now I'm sure you know that one of the idiosyncrasies of the ghouls' approach to winemaking is that they go for very long oak aging. Yeah. So they actually keep their top charades vionettes, the la laas, as we call them, in wood for three and a half years. Oh, wow.
Tim Kirk:And so we were there in '91, but we were tasting eighty eights out of barrel. '88 was a very strong year in the Northern Rome. And, can I say, the wines were just magnificent? Magnificent. So I'd, of course, grown up in the Australian context, we have so many wonderful, in their own right, big, thick, black fruited Australian Shiraz.
Tim Kirk:You think of the great wines coming out of the Barossa Valley, for example, or McLaren Vale or the Clear Valley. Wonderful wines, but strong, dark, heedy, robust, you know, and delicious. But these wines, these coyotes were nothing like them even though they were well, there's three of them. And then as I'm sure you know, there there's one La Landon is a 100% Syrah, what Aussies call Shiraz. Then Le Turc in that vineyard, these are all single parcels.
Tim Kirk:And Le Turc vineyard that has 7% Viognier comp planted in amongst the Syrah. And then my personal favorite is Le Moulin, which is right on the highway there and just outside of Empuy, the center of Cote Roti, where in that magnificent terraced amphitheater vineyard perfectly shaped and faced towards the South and Southeast, you know, La Moulin. That vineyard's got 10 to 11% Viognier plundered in amongst the Syrah. And so I was tasting for really the first time these Shiraz or, like, a Syrah Viognier co fermented wines from single parcels, great sites in Cote D'Ivoire. And the wines were just beguiling, haunting perfumes, spices galore, floral elements lifted upward directed perfumes, which kind of kept you guessing and kept you drawing you back to the glass and thinking, what is that that I'm smelling?
Tim Kirk:The subtleties, the spices, the savory dimensions are woven through with flashes of red berries and roses, and I just thought they were extraordinary wines Yeah. And came obviously to the conclusion, wow, wouldn't it be amazing if we could ever produce something like that back in Australia? And here's the miracle, and I do think it's a miracle putting my theological hat on. There's some divine intervention here because I had that cote roti revelation tasting those Syrah Viognier cofferments in cote roti. And then a few weeks later, we were traveling back to Australia, we arrived at the beginning of 1992.
Tim Kirk:And the Viognier that my dad had nurtured and kind of molly coddled along for these six years was about to put forward a tiny crop for the first time. Yeah. See, my dad's vision had been to make a white wine, a a straight Viognier, which we now do. Actually, we make two of them. We do an un wooded one and a baro fermented one, the cloniquilla Viognier.
Tim Kirk:It's delicious wine. But I said to dad when I returned from Carroti, you know, that you've spent the last six years nurturing and lovingly attending to with a view to making a white wine. That's not. Let's get those wraps and chuck them in with the Charrette's ferment. And I think to his great credit, really, because I was 24, full of beans, so enthusiastic, you know, crazy ideas.
Tim Kirk:Here's my dad. He'd done all the hard work. Yeah. But he said, okay. We'll do it.
Tim Kirk:So it kind of fell to me to develop that wine, which eventually turned into, after a couple of years, the chronic killer Shiraz Viognier. And by '94, we had enough to put in four percent, and then we got really excited and I think got possibly a bit carried away. We were doing 10% Viognier in the '95 and '96, and since then we've pared it back a little bit now. It tends to go between 57%. But it was wonderful.
Tim Kirk:Like, was it was like, I remember one great Australian wine writer, Jeremy Oliver, in his magazine, he used to put out he did this article, which was titled a patch of coattroti near Canberra. Because it it was then and is today beguilingly look. I don't know what to say because it's not it's not coattroti. It will never be coattroti. It's a wine from Murrumbateman near Canberra, But it's Shiraz grown in granitic soils in a continental climate, gentle climate with a long ripening window, and it produces these gorgeous perfumes.
Tim Kirk:All those subtleties that we talked about, savory, peppery, spicy elements Yeah. With flashes of red fruit and then floral kind of bursts through it as well. And it's you know, as you know yourself quite well, Alex, it's beguiled more than one very good taster Yeah. Taste of blinds. Like, they can be quite convinced this is kairochi Yeah.
Tim Kirk:When it's actually made the other side of the world.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. I love that story. It is such a beautiful miracle, and there's so many parts to it. As someone who's also an entrepreneur Mhmm. I hope that when my two year old is eight or 12 or 22 and comes to me with a good idea, I actually listen.
Alex Abbott Boyd:But like, you know, I don't it's hard to say for sure if you will.
Tim Kirk:And
Alex Abbott Boyd:your dad listened to two, two children who were far too young arguably to have a good idea, but clearly not.
Tim Kirk:Don't know. Clearly not. That's true.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And it is really to his credit to listen.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. Yeah. Well, they say, and this is probably getting a little bit off off topic, but it's very interesting, I think, that intelligence, of course, evolves as you get older, and it's a different sort of intelligence that you have. Say, now I'm in my fifties, heading towards 60. You've got it's more crystallized intelligence.
Tim Kirk:You've got this huge library to draw from all these experiences you've had and things that you know. But when you're 24, you've got much more fluid, flexible, creative intelligence. Yeah. And it's apparently causing to, Arthur Brooks and his excellent book Strength to Strength and the research that he referred to there that so many so many of the great discoveries that have been occurred in science or in many other fields happen when people are in their twenties or thirties. Mhmm.
Tim Kirk:So honor the creativity and the energy of young intelligence, and you'll do well.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I couldn't agree more. Yeah. I started my first business when I was about 22.
Tim Kirk:There you go. There you go.
Alex Abbott Boyd:So you touched a little bit about the Canberra District and its unique Noir. Could you just share a little bit more about the vineyard soil, elevation, climate, and how those inform the work you both do in the vineyard and then the kinds of wines that you produce?
Tim Kirk:Well, it's interesting. The the soil is ancient. So we we were on sitting on really ancient volcanic flows. So this is stuff that would have, at some point, been lava, and it's solidified into rock. And then over millions of years, it has been broken down through the steady action of water.
Tim Kirk:So it's basically loosely this is a bit of a catchall phrase, but let's call it decomposed granite. And on top of that deep decomposed sort of crusty rock, which is now soil, mineral rich and interesting. On top of that, in various not uniformly, but in a patchy kind of way in the vineyard, there is this red clay, and it could be 10 centimeters down to, say, maybe in 20 or 30 centimeters. And this is intriguing, this red clay. What's the red clay?
Tim Kirk:Well, the best guess that the geologists have is that it's actually dust. Red dust, soil dust that's been blown in over hundreds of thousands of years in an earlier geological age in dust storms, and it because people know this much about Australia that much of it is red, like the red center of Australia. So this soil in dust storms is picked up, and the soil can be carried up extremely high and carried long distances in massive storms and then deposited over these slopes.
Alex Abbott Boyd:It's so close to the Australian Outback is present in
Tim Kirk:that It's part of the terroir. So you are. Actually, that's a very good way. Wouldn't have even thought of putting it that way before. Know, you're drinking a very authentic Australian terroir, which is even more ancient than that particular patch because it was borrowed from soils much, much further to the west.
Tim Kirk:And that's what is forming this very complex element in our terroir in our landscape. Apart from the mineral element, it's got its physical properties. It's a permeable clay in the main, which is to say it operates a bit like a sponge so the water can move through, but the sponge will retain water. It'll stay It'll hold on to it. And when the weather warms up and dries up, the clay will hang on to enough moisture to feed the vines through the hotter, drier periods Yeah.
Tim Kirk:Which is perfect. It's what you want. The other key element, of course, is the climate itself. And the key driver here, I'm gonna say, is the height above sea level. So we sit vineyards more or less if you average it out about 600 meters above sea level.
Tim Kirk:And what does that mean? Well, it's continental. It means you have hot summers and cold winters. I know I'm talking to Canadians, so there's cold winters, and there's cold winters. Yeah.
Tim Kirk:I'm not talking I'm not talking Canada cold. I'm talking in winter, it'd be normal to have minus twos, minus threes, down to minus sixes.
Alex Abbott Boyd:You know? Sounds like a very beautifully mild winter to me. Very mild.
Tim Kirk:Very mild by by Canadian standards. But the days can be warm. Okay. So even in winter, so we could getting getting tops in the middle of winter and say thirteen, twelve, 13 degrees and lows of minus four. So you got this, like, seventeen, eighteen, 20 degree range between your high and your low on any given day.
Tim Kirk:And that same dynamic is translates into the summer and the autumn. So to demonstrate the point, we were going through a heat wave as we often do in Australia a couple of years ago, think, gee, it's hot. I said, gee, it's hot. 36 degrees is the forecast top today. Yeah.
Tim Kirk:And I thought, well, let's have a look at my friends over in Barossa or Clear Valley. What what are they going through? I'll look up the Bureau of Meteorology, and they had the same forecast top, 36 degrees. But here's the difference. The low forecast for Adelaide in South Australia that day was 26 degrees.
Tim Kirk:Top of 36, low of 26 degrees. In Canberra, if we're near Canberra, forecast top 36 degrees, forecast low 16 degrees. Yeah. So 10 degrees lower. And I would say if you had to name just one, it's not this simple, but if you had to name just one factor that influences the style of wines we make, it's the coolness of the nights.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. The coolness of the nights. Because if you think about it, the nights get cooled through the ripening season. Going into autumn, they're cooling down. The nights cooling down.
Tim Kirk:And the grapevine itself becomes less efficient as a biological unit once the temperature drops below, say, 15 degrees Celsius. It just becomes more sluggish in performing its duties. Yeah. Or what are what are a grapevine's duties? Well, during the day when it's sunny, it's to capture sun, photosynthesize, translate that into sugars, deposit the sugars into the grapes.
Tim Kirk:That's its daytime duties. Once it's nighttime duties, the nighttime duty of a grapevine is to break down the acid in those same grapes. So you the acids get degraded at night. The sugar and the flavors associated with the sugars get accumulated during the day.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Kirk:So when the nights start to get cool, so down to 12 degrees, 10 degrees, eight degrees, five degrees, it gets less good at doing its nighttime work of degrading acid or breaking down acid in those grains, which means by the time you get around to harvesting, say, mid March into mid April, you've still got quite a bit of acid left because it hasn't been efficient in breaking down the acid because it's got too cool for it at night. And that's great. Because it means you've got lots of natural acid. This gives you crispness, freshness, brightness, and longevity. You know, if you if you ever taste like a clonakiller Riesling, it's got pH of three.
Tim Kirk:It's got eight to nine grams of acid. It's got zap. You know? You taste it. It's got all this beautiful fruit and floral and citrus and ripe apple, but then the texture is this clean, clear, acid fresh reality, which if it's all natural.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That's That is so interesting. I've never studied viticulture properly. When you're studying to be a somm, they just say, oh, cooler nights, slow down, ripen it. Is what is that? Yeah.
Tim Kirk:Which would Will they do that? I mean, the whole thing is slowed down, but there's ripening and there's acid degradation, and there's flavor accumulation. And what sort of flavors are you gonna get? Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Kirk:So a a more gentle, a slower accumulation of flavor and sugar, definitely, with cool climate, and a less efficient breaking down of acid, which is a good thing.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. That's fascinating. Shifting then from the vineyard into the winery. Yeah. I know that your winemaking could be described as minimal intervention.
Tim Kirk:Mhmm.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Could you maybe walk us through the philosophy that you have in the winery in practice and maybe how it differs between some of the different wines that you make?
Tim Kirk:Yeah. I I guess I've always felt that the the winemaking is there to serve the fruit. And the romantic French idea, which I think is a lovely idea that, as we've already spoken about really, that the job of the grapevine and the grapes and then the winemaking is to give the landscape a voice. So you want to capture the flavors, the aromas, and the textures which want to emerge from that very particular landscape. So rather than impose your vision on what the wine should taste like, you wanna be more like listening to the grapes.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. So the sort of flavors we get in that cool climate scenario that we just talked about, warm days, cool nights. We get more delicate flavors. You know, Alex, and your listeners know that there was a time when Robert Parker, is a very fine man, a very influential wine critic in the nineties and February in particular, and a great taster, I have to say. Did a lot of good in many ways, but he had a special love for ripeness and richness.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. And a lot of winemakers kind of followed that trend. And you got Shiraz wines came coming out of Australia in the late nineties and in the February, which was sort of hitting 15 or 16 or 17% alcohol. We couldn't make wines like that if we tried Yeah. In our climate.
Tim Kirk:They to get it to 16 baumet, to give you 16% alcohol, they'd be raisins will and truly by then. You know? So we them at most, we can produce medium bodied reds, and they are given that cool night scenario that we just talked through. They're gonna be more delicate. They're gonna be more probably a little bit more to the savory end of the spectrum than to the sweet end of the spectrum in terms of the flavors that you get.
Tim Kirk:So you think more like plumskin or cherries or red berries maybe rather than blackberries. Yeah. Like, it's more redness.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Tim Kirk:Roses, cranberries, those aromas and with floral elements and spice elements woven through. So we want those flavors. That's what our landscape produces. That's what our terroir, if I can steal the French word, is wanting to say. And so our winemaking needs to be respectful of that, of those flavors.
Tim Kirk:So we experimented. And it made sense. This is a more European style climate, so we should think about some European approaches to winemaking. So over the thirty years, say over the thirty years now that we were doing Shiraz Viogner, we started very early on to like, in 1993 was the first year we introduced using whole bunches. A third whole bunches in our Shiraz ferments, a third of the grapes were undestemmed.
Tim Kirk:We just plopped those whole bunches straight into the fermented, and we just stemmed the rest, the two thirds on top of them.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And what does what does doing that bring to the wine?
Tim Kirk:Well, that's very interesting. It brings a couple of things. You will definitely pick up some flavor from the stalks themselves. I mean, you got stalks which are soaking in a solution which starts off as grape juice and turns into alcohol through the action of yeast fermentation. So by the end of the ferment, they're sitting in an alcoholic solution, 14% alcohol maybe, and that's gonna be extracting flavor and some and tannin from the stalks.
Tim Kirk:I don't mind a little bit of stalkiness. You gotta be careful you don't overdo it, though. Yeah. And you want the stalks to be reasonably ripe. But more interesting still than the stalkiness is that what's going on in the grape itself as it stays attached to the stalk in the ferment.
Tim Kirk:Okay? Sometimes this is referred to intracellular fermentation. So a berry that itch is still plugged into the stem is fascinating. A fermentation of sorts actually goes on inside the berry. We use reasonably long ferments, like three weeks would be average for our churras vionnet, and we use, say, 20 to 30% whole bunches.
Tim Kirk:But even by the end, you'll still find some grapes doggedly sticking to the stems. Yeah. And if I pull that grape off and squeeze the juice inside onto onto a hydrometer to read the sugar. I find that about half of the sugar is fermented. And the other interesting thing is that it's extracted color from the inside of the berry.
Tim Kirk:Oh. Because I'm sure you know that a red grape, when you pick it, the day you pick it, you split the berry open, the juice inside is clear. All the pigments in the skins is when you rupture the skins, and the ruptured skins are in contact with the juice that the pigments are leaking into the grape juice. But with these whole bunch of ferments, you pull off a berry that's been in a ferment for a couple of weeks. The juice inside is half fermented and red in color, so it's extracted flavor and color from the inside of the berry, and it has this lovely perfume.
Tim Kirk:Like, I don't know. What are we gonna say? Let's call it maybe a cherry. I mean, any word I'm use here is just an approximation. I'm trying to describe it, but it gives a lovely, more red, fruited, lifted perfume.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. It's very common in burgundy, and pinot makers love this, of course, and everyone has their own take on how much to use or whether to use any at all as we discussed earlier with Russo versus DRC. But we find in our Shiraz that we've been as low as zero and as much as a 100%, and that 20 to 30% is our sweet spot. Yeah. So one or two cuvets, we bump it up, you know, to try and see what it's like, and it's pretty interesting.
Tim Kirk:But with all things, we're trying to get a balance, and I think we do a pretty good job.
Alex Abbott Boyd:So are you I'm guessing you're not giving the Cooigall treatment of three years in in barrel?
Tim Kirk:No. We haven't followed Marcello and Philippe down that road, even though how much I admire those wines. We actually go about twelve months inward. Okay. We do a couple of micro couvets from single parcel, some years, which we would go for two years in in wood.
Tim Kirk:But generally speaking, it's more twelve months, and then you get all that gorgeous, bright, rich fruit character, which is what I adore. If I'm honest, it's I'm so seduced by the beauty of the perfume. I wanna keep as much of that as I can, and that's how it goes.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That's the results speak for themselves. They're so delicious. Very kind. How do you hope your wines are experienced? So what do you want people to feel when they're having a glass of Klonakilla?
Tim Kirk:Yeah. Well, it's kind of the same thing as as we experience, like because we do like, vineyard itself, it's not a big vineyard by Australian standards. So we have maybe I think it's 17 hectares of vines on the estate. We also buy fruit from other growers for some of our wines, but the Shiraz Vionna, the top cuvee, that's always just the estate fruit. And we don't make one Shiraz Vigne.
Tim Kirk:We actually might make 20. Like, every parcel, every clone, some are on their own roots, some are on rootstocks, some are on north facing slopes or east facing slopes or some slightly south facing slopes or even slightly west facing slopes. And every block is kept separate and fermented separately, and then we will do numerous tastings blinds through the course of the year to discern which of that twenty, twenty two parcels of Shirazvioni that we've made will go into the blend, the top blend, the Shirazvioni. And it's as simple as this, basically. It's wow.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. You know? You're doing this tasting of parcels blind, and it's like, wow. Smell that. Yeah.
Tim Kirk:How beautiful? How gorgeous is that? Yeah. It's not especially salicy. It
Alex Abbott Boyd:doesn't need to be more sophisticated if you can hit wow.
Tim Kirk:If you can hit wow. And so the wines which are unanimously wow, they'll end up in the cherazpione. But in years, like many, many years, in fact, the difference between the full Wow wines and the slightly less Wow wines is not is not much. Yeah. So we have a second wine called the Erida Shiraz, which is
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. I always tell people it's the sneaky value because it could be could be half Shiraz Viognier.
Tim Kirk:You don't know. That's right. Something like up to sometimes even more than half of that wine is actually declassified Shiraz Vignet. And in a in a great year, like, you know, we're looking at 20 fives now, but you can say the same about the 20 threes or 20 fours. The the distance between the top and the second level is not much.
Tim Kirk:But back to your question, what do I want people to experience? It's basically wow. It's the it's the perfume initially. I I love people using really good glassware, good nice big bowl where you can really get the aroma of the perfume, and it's a beautiful thing. And that's a subjective thing too.
Alex Abbott Boyd:For me, when I was just getting into wine, those wow moments happened far more regularly because every everything was new. And some wines, like a beautiful Fleurie, gave me such a wow moment once that I traveled all the way to Fleurie to meet the person who made it. Totally get that. But and I and I import that wine now. I love that wine, but it it doesn't give me a wow anymore.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. And so I would be curious, having made wine at Klonakilla for so long and tasted so many of your own amazing wines, is it harder? Is the standards getting higher or is the you think that your piece of dirt is just so special it can wow you every year?
Tim Kirk:Well, that's a great question. That's a very interesting question because I'm surrounded by these wines, and I and I taste them a lot. But, yeah, I think there's still a fairly big wow impact. I think one of my favorite tastings to do is that that first tasting when the wines are very young and raw, they might have just gone into barrel and take them out and have a look at them. And Yeah.
Tim Kirk:Then you get that first impact, first view snapshot of the vintage. You know? I love that because we talk about the personality of the site, the terroir, the landscape that we're trying to capture, but there's also overlaid on top of that the personality of the vintage. You know? So that's all got its unique character as well.
Tim Kirk:So, yeah, I'm I'm still fascinated and intrigued by it, the beauty of it, the dignity of it. You know, for me, you know, my training's in theology, so, of course, I'm gonna say something like this. I it's a reflection of the goodness of the world. It it's it's it's the physical created landscape in which we I've been traveling around Canada the last few days. I tell you what, you've got some beautiful, beautiful, beautiful landscape.
Tim Kirk:So, you know, the question arises, well, what would this landscape taste like if it was expressed itself as wine? Yeah. So we get to work with beauty. We get to work with creation. We get to work with growing things and trying to capture something which is inherent in the earth, in the world, something good and noble and true and beautiful, and it still wows me.
Tim Kirk:Yes. It still wows me. I love it. And I love that thing about personality. You can sound because I realized you're talking about Romney Conte or Rousseau.
Tim Kirk:They are so crazy expensive now Yeah. That so few people will will get
Alex Abbott Boyd:their taste.
Tim Kirk:Not really. But, you know, you taste those wines or the great Australian wines or I'm sure the great Canadian wines or the great Napa wines, you know, that they they're distinctive. They have their own personality because they come from a very distinctive piece of landscape. At the top level, you're tasting the landscape. You know?
Tim Kirk:And and I and I love that idea. So, yeah, I think we are. We're very blessed, and that's a good word for it, with this landscape that we have there at Murrenbaden. It just seems to be that mixture of all the complex soil structure, the ancient volcanic flows, the decomposed granitic soils, the continental climate, the warmth of the days, the coolness of the nights Yeah. The way the wind comes up in the evening coming off the coast two hours away and flows through those hills and cools things down.
Tim Kirk:It's magic. And we capture all of those realities through our viticulture and our winemaking. And, yeah, it's wow. It's beautiful. It's awe inspiring.
Tim Kirk:It's a lovely thing and a lovely thing to be doing.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. I love that. I would love if you're able to expand a little bit about on one of the the points you made about the goodness of the created world and how wine can express that. Yeah. I'd I'd love to hear a little bit more about that too because I know your background is in theology, and I'd love to hear how how all those things weave together for you.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. 100%. No. Thank you for that. That's I'd love to talk about that because that's that's really the my great love.
Tim Kirk:I'm I'm a I'm a person of personal faith, strong faith, and my faith is in a in a good loving God, and I suppose I would want to say that the evidence of that is around us. I suppose there's evidence of a lot of pain and suffering in the world too. I'm not denying that. But in in Christian theology, theology one zero one, if you like, is about if there is if you accept that there is a god, I mean, how does god reveal himself, god's self? How do you how do you find out anything about god?
Tim Kirk:And, of course, we have, in the Christian faith, two thousand years of reflection on that question, and and we have a number of ways we answer it. But the first level that we answer it, how can you know anything about God, is the is natural theology. So what about nature? I mean, look at how everything is so amazingly complex, intricate, and intertwined and working together, the whole ecosystem, the way things work, it's so extraordinarily complex and and functions so amazingly coherently that it speaks of a great love, I guess, behind it all. There's something very good behind what we just see with our eyes and creation.
Tim Kirk:There's something wonderful here that's kind of sorta hidden, but sort of if you've got eyes to see it, kind of you can see it. And wine and winemaking is is kinda almost a unique entry point into that way of thinking because it's not just the beauty of the physical landscape, the slope and the growing vineyard and the seasons and the colors and the scent of the grapevines when they're flowering. I adore all that. Yeah. But it's more than that because you get to harvest the grapes.
Tim Kirk:You get to watch them ripen, and you you kind of nurture them through that period. And what I my job during the vineyard as chief winemaker is I'm walking up and down the vine rows tasting tasting grapes, grapes, thinking, well, when is this when is this particular patch? When is this parcel of vines? When are these grapes just at their most perfectly attuned, ripe, ready Yeah. You know, to to express the beauty of this particular piece of landscape?
Tim Kirk:And, yeah, I I get to do that. I I get to pick those grapes and re ferment them, and that releases grapes themselves. I can as you know, taste delicious. Yeah. But then you ferment them, Yeah.
Tim Kirk:And, you know, you can end up with a Romney Conte or a Rousseau or a cherazebiognier, like and and it releases a whole new universe of aroma and perfume and flavor that were hidden. So it's like how the hidden thing is revealed. Like, that's kind of theology. How is the hidden thing revealed? So the theology of wine, it's a miracle.
Tim Kirk:You've got a hidden thing. It's beautiful at one level, but then you ferment it and nurture it and cherish it through that period and be very careful about how you do it. And a whole new level of beauty and dignity and power and grandeur is revealed. Yeah. And you find yourself smelling a glass, which your only response is, wow.
Tim Kirk:Yeah. That is amazing. If you smell a glass of grape juice, you think, no. That's okay. Yeah.
Tim Kirk:You smell a glass of Romney Conte, La Tache 1978 Alright. Or a L'Am All In 1990, and it's that's a holy level of wow. Like, something has been revealed through that process, which is awe inspiring. So, yeah, that's the way I talk about wine. It's what was on
Alex Abbott Boyd:the table at the last supper. It's clearly Yes.
Tim Kirk:It's right through the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition. Wine is the it's the table beverage, and, you know, of course, and, you know, from from a Catholic Christian point of view, we have a particular love for the Eucharist, and wine is the key. Bread and wine. Through bread and wine, something much, much greater is revealed and and and given and shared Yeah. The person of Christ himself.
Tim Kirk:So, yeah, it's deep. It's deep and beautiful,
Alex Abbott Boyd:and I love all of it. Yeah. It's beautiful and so eloquently shared. Thank you so much for that. Looking forward, what excites you most about the future of Klonikella?
Tim Kirk:We're very conscious of being stewards of this landscape, very respectful of the landscape. That's something that's deep in the Australian consciousness too. Like, our indigenous brothers and sisters before us have have really taught us this to really honor and cherish the land that you walk on. You know? Because you just walk on it for a time.
Tim Kirk:You know? You just walk on it for a time. So you're stewarding something which is ancient and and wonderful. So to be gentle about that. But to see that as an intergenerational task now.
Tim Kirk:So, Clonica was founded by my dad, and I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity to, with my dad's mentorship, take it on and then develop it and bring my own creativity and passion to the project and expand it significantly. And now my younger brother, Steve, has has taken over for me as a CEO. I recently stood down a couple of years ago as CEO, and funnily enough, to so that I could have some more time for my ministry in church in involvements, which is my other great passion, while I retain the key role of being chief winemaker. But now my kids are getting involved. So two of my sons are involved, and my son-in-law is studying wine science at Charles Sturt where my dad study.
Tim Kirk:So seeing that move into the next generation now and I think the vines are getting older. Like, we've been there. The very first vines were planted in '71, so they're 54 years old, and we've added to those vineyards. So we're learning more and more every year about how to care for the vines, how to manage it respectfully, and then to see my kids get involved. And I've got grandkids of my own now who are just teeny tiny.
Tim Kirk:My oldest grandchild is two. So who knows how that's all gonna fall out? But I'd love to think that that this multigenerational reverential project of stewarding this particular piece of landscape and capturing the beauty that's hidden in it, sharing it with the world will continue. That's beautiful. I
Alex Abbott Boyd:I hope it does too. It'd be great. Generation three and four just continue rolling with it. And
Tim Kirk:100%. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And that seems to be what's happening, so we're grateful.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Oh, that's that's awesome. Thank you so much for your time.
Tim Kirk:It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Wonderful. Thanks for having me.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Thank you so much for listening. I've got some incredible interviews coming up that I can't wait to share with you, So please make sure to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss a thing. If you enjoyed the episode, a quick rating or review goes a long way in helping others discover the show and it means a lot to me. Until next time, cheers.
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