It’s been a loud and percussive year for Hamish and Kate Laurie, the folks behind Deviation Road wines based at Longwood.
They’ve been non-stop popping the corks of their much-admired sparkling wines, led by their fabulous and award-winning Beltana Blanc de Blancs and Loftia Vintage Brut, in celebration of their winery’s 25th anniversary.
It’s been a year of soaking up just how far they have come on their long and winding road, a journey that began thousands of kilometres apart and with strong yet separate wine family connections – in SA for Hamish and in WA for Kate. They later landed in their beloved Adelaide Hills to build a family and a brand recognised as one of the most impressive ambassadors in the world of fine South Australian sparkling wine.
“We joke, of course,” Kate reflects, “that Hamish and I are really excited to be 25 all over again.”
The celebrations with wine industry colleagues have led them this year all over the country, finally returning to their Longwood winery and cellar door base to share their inspiring story with local friends and wine trade in October.
It was there that Kate introduced her mother, Sue Hooker, to the assembly, releasing yet another of those multitude of corks from a 1999 museum bottle of her family’s Stone Bridge Estate sparklings from Manjimup in south-west WA. It was a joyous moment of family pride, and a serious statement about just how amazingly great sparklings can sustain their prowess for years, even generations.
It was back there Kate began her story with wine, though she admits as a young teenager she “hated it”. By the age of 19, however, she was off to France to study winemaking at the Lycee Viticole d’Avize in Champagne, following her passion for all things French. On her return she made wine with her dad, Syd, for four years before packing up again in the early 1980s and moving to Sydney as international trade manager for the French Chamber of Commerce.
By this time, she and Hamish had started to connect at wine trade days as both their businesses were represented by the same distributor.
“We started dating pretty much straight away, and that lasted eight months before I flew down here and helped Hamish turn Deviation Road into a producer brand with him growing the grapes and me making the wine,” Kate says.
That’s where we switch now to the remarkable Laurie family saga that reaches back five generations to when Buxton and Mary Laurie set up, in 1853, one of the colony’s earliest vineyards and wineries in the Pt Elliott district of the Fleurieu Peninsula. When he died, Mary, with her eight children in tow, ran the Southcote family winery for a quarter of a century until her death in 1898. She was SA’s first registered female vigneron; the original estate name living on today via one of Deviation Road’s sparklings, the Southcote Blanc de Noirs.
The Laurie story continued, albeit with some breaks, with some of Mary’s progeny working at the Woodley winery at Glen Osmond in the early 20th Century, as well as at McLaren Vale in the latter half of the 1900s.
The family name passed down to Hamish’s father Dr Chris Laurie, who grew grapes at McLaren Vale and eventually, recognising the potential for cooler climate wines, established a Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vineyard in the early 1980s on Deviation Road at Carey Gully, selling the fruit to Petaluma for Croser sparkling wine and Yalumba for their Yalumba D sparkling range, and eventually creating the Hillstowe brand for table wines.
After Hamish met Kate, at the turn of the century, they kickstarted their own wine business, the Deviation Road brand, eventually moving into their own digs at Scott Creek Road in 2004, while still making their first wines off site at Mt Torrens.
The dream to make great sparkling wines was never far from our minds
“The dream to make great sparkling wines was never far from our minds,” Kate says.
But it wasn’t until 2008 when they had their own facility up and running with the specialised equipment needed to do so, that they created their first sparkling at their home base.
The evolution of their own business and the greater sparkling genre in the Adelaide Hills has been nothing short of astounding, Kate says.
“We were making the decision to grow and make sparklings with fruit that had been pruned for sparkling, and not as an afterthought, which at that stage was how a lot of sparklings around Australia were made, though not all,” she says.
“A few of us started making that concerted effort to say ‘this is a premium sparkling’, and I think a lot of people in the Adelaide Hills have adopted that.”
After the original Deviation Road vineyard at Carey Gully was sold in 2009, Hamish and Kate started selecting a few growers around the region, starting in the Piccadilly Valley and now also including Lenswood, other sites in Carey Gully, Aldgate and Gumeracha, while their own vineyard at Longwood supplies still wines under their brand.
The chosen vineyards provide what Kate calls the right flavour and acidity balance, essential in fine sparklings.
“How each site gets there can be quite different,” Kate says.
“And having the varied sites in the tapestry of tanks we’ve got here gives us the option of seeing what performs each season.
“In Champagne, the vineyards are close to each other and have very nuanced differences from site to site, while here we can be kilometres apart, with different altitudes and orientations, so the variations between sites is so much greater.”
Even the harvest times can be five weeks apart just for Deviation Road’s own portfolio.
That huge diversity of vineyard sites is one of the Hills great advantages, giving winemakers a wider range of fruit characters to play with either as single vineyard options or blended to create a matrix of flavours and textures.
As to Kate’s favourite vineyard, it’s somewhere in the Piccadilly Valley, though the exact location remains hers and Hamish’s secret.
“I actually have like a déjà vu response, when I go in there,” Kate says. “If I close my eyes, and I can hear the water running, I can feel like I’m in Champagne. There’s something about this place that just feels old worldly.”
But it’s not. It’s quintessentially Adelaide Hills, and that’s entirely what Kate and Hamish and Deviation Road want to express in their wines, both sparklings and also their still wines, which connect into their main act as they look to be recognised for their table Chardonnays and Pinot Noir as much as their famed fizzes.
“That’s 100% what we try and do,” Kate reiterates.
“It’s to capture the Adelaide Hills, the essence of the Adelaide Hills. Our still wine program is equally as attentive as the sparkling.
“And we’re just at the beginning, really.
Hopefully there will be a 100-year future for Adelaide Hills sparklings
“Hopefully there will be a 100-year future for Adelaide Hills sparklings. And down the track they can talk about the experiments that we’ve been running now in our little business and other people making sparklings, which in the end is only about showcasing what the region can do best.”
How that translates in the glass is Chardonnay based wines with a core line of refreshing acidity and what Kate tries to capture as a lemon blossom and lemon oil-like flavour profile, not too much towards tropical flavours. Pinot Noir, on the other hand, offers cherry and spice notes.
The most satisfying result of their focused sparkling program, especially, is the freshness of the wines, even after they have been maturing in their second fermentation cycle in the bottle that you buy, for up to seven years for newly released Beltana, and in a more limited series of even older wines that have been only recently readied for drinking in what’s called a Late Disgorged program.
These methods are what are known as the Traditional Method of making sparklings, as has been done in Champagne for centuries.
“It’s extraordinary, when you think about it, that our Beltana Blanc de Blancs (all Chardonnay) has been maturing for seven years before it is released,” Hamish proudly says, “and still has such purity about it.”
It’s this message, that great sparkling wines do rise out of the Adelaide Hills, that he and Kate are keen to expand on across Australia, to establish the region over and above other cooler climate areas of the country.
“We’re still very early days,” Hamish adds. “We may be celebrating 25 years, but to me it seems like five years and we’re still being discovered.
“We’re still pioneering and we’re still getting word out there to the world that the Adelaide Hills does very well and punches above its weight.
“But I think there’s an opportunity to get that message out more than ever.”
