Everything you need to know about this year’s Halliday Wine Companion Best Chardonnay winner.
Take a short drive an hour outside of Melbourne and you'll find Oakridge, one of the most celebrated wineries in the highly-regarded Yarra Valley region. Oakridge was first founded in 1978, but it was during the last 20 years under the guidance of winemaker David Bicknell that the winery became internationally celebrated for its stunning cool climate wines.
David’s approach to winemaking is dedicated to attention to detail, respecting the produce, and a constant dedication to improvement. While larger wineries tend to mix and match grapes from across vineyards, David is more particular. At Oakridge he’s microdissected every block of grapes, mapping out the slightest difference between how each section of the vineyard is affected by the environment. Which means he’s able to foresee exactly how each grape can be utilised to its full potential.
It’s an approach to winemaking that has paid off substantially, with a string of awards including the just announced Best Chardonnay in the 2022 Halliday Wine Companion Awards [Editor's note 24/04/23: Oakridge was also just awarded Real Review's Winery of the Year for 2023]. David sat down with us in the afterglow of winning one of Australia’s most prestigious wine competitions to talk more about Oakridge and his approach to winemaking.
Q: Firstly, congratulations on winning Best Chardonnay in the 2022 Halliday Wine Companion Awards! How does it feel?
Well, you know, it takes 20 years to be an overnight success [laughs]. It's really been 20 years of hand to hand combat to get this. It’s been an unrelenting dedication to try and make things better and to think our way through every issue we came across — so it's a fantastic recognition. And while it's nice to get the recognition, winning awards has never been the driving force. It’s great but it's not why I do it.
Q: How did you first get started in winemaking?
My father was a master mariner and because he travelled the world multiple times, he got a taste for wine. So we were brought up in a family where wine was always on the table. After leaving school, I actually worked as a registered nurse for five years. And a friend I met at that time, we’d always come out to the Yarra Valley to taste and buy wine. Then someone explained to me that you could actually study winemaking. It had never occurred to me that there was a course and a career in it. And so I sold everything I had except a bag of clothes, got into Roseworthy Agricultural College, and never looked back. I never worked in a hospital again because I just felt like I had to make something.
Q: Could you give us a run down of the different ranges of Oakridge wine and how they differ?
The Oakridge range follows an old logic where it’s broken up like a pyramid. At the base you have our Over the Shoulder range, made with fruit from anywhere across the Yarra Valley. And they’re very much fruit driven, uncluttered, and distinctly varietal wines.
The next level up is the Vineyard Wines where, for chardonnay and pinot in particular, we're moving into higher, cooler vineyards. They’re picked later and we don't have to do anything to it. And this is a key part of it — we’re not having to add acid or yeast, or any of those things. It's a very natural way of approaching it.
And finally there’s our 864 Single Block range, which are exceptional wines from specific and single blocks of vineyards, produced in small quantities and released in only the best years. It's all about having an exceptional primary product, which means the right variety grown in the right place to the correct ripeness.
Q: How does the Yarra Valley region play a role in your winemaking?
One of the great things about the Yarra Valley is that we've got some varieties in particular that resonate beautifully in a place where all of those important boxes, like aspect, site, soil, elevation, and geology, are being ticked. I've had the good fortune to come across these vineyards that make metronomically beautiful wine, chardonnay for example. And they've been able to produce complexity, scale, precision, and add an X factor that really gets people going.
Q: Your 2019 864 Chardonnay just won the 2022 Halliday Wine Companion Award for Best Chardonnay. It’ll be released in select Dan Murphy’s stores this September, what can we expect from that vintage?
2019 was an interesting year because it was pretty warm and it was a little earlier than we would like. Early on I wasn't too sure if we had got the quality to make it an 864 wine. It wasn't, you know, a perfect vintage to be honest. But it was one of those wines that’s a real sleeper. It just needed that little bit of extra time to really come around. So the fact that it was up there for Best Chardonnay is fantastic. I was thrilled.
