Dean Hewitson Celebrates 160 Years of Mourvedre

The legendary Australian wine critic James Halliday once said that Dean Hewitson makes “wines with flair” and obviously there is a reflection of Dean himself mirrored in each and every bottle of wine he makes. Outgoing in nature and a true lover of the great outdoors, Dean has made a mark for himself as an accomplished winemaker over the years spent toiling in the vineyards firstly on one of Australia’s great wineries, Petaluma, and now for himself at Hewitson.

But it all could have been completely different. “I actually got accepted into study film producing”, Dean tells me as we sip one of his Old Garden Mourvedre’s in Hong Kong’s Upper House Hotel bar at Café Grey. “But then I got to the dancing and singing auditions and I thought maybe I’m in the wrong field here as I can’t dance or sing! So looked down the list of options and winemaking was there”.

The world can now breathe a collective sigh of relief that, even as it will never know if Dean was to be the next Baz Luhrmann, at least the international circle of wine lovers can feel blessed that his tone deafness and two left feet steered him in the direction to make some of Australia’s greatest wines.

“It all started at an early age” says Dean. “My family had a couple of friends who had a very small vineyard that got pulled up on the vine pull, but prior to that as a kid I was exposed early on to wine and without that I would have probably never heard of the wine industry”.

These days, Dean works on some of the oldest vineyards, and in some cases the oldest vineyards in the world. His internationally acclaimed Mourvedre, of which we taste a vertical from 1998 to 2010, is crafted from the oldest Mourvedre vines on the planet which were planted in 1853 by Friedrich Koch and are still owned by the family that originally planted the vines.

These vines are all pre-Phylloxera and Dean himself admits that having the family that has owned them for seven generations farm the land for him is a good thing. “This is a perfect arrangement because after so many generations they know more about the land than I ever would”.

But it wasn’t easy getting his hands on these now 160 year old grape producing vines. “I wanted to start my own business so literally went around, saw these old vineyards and knocked on the growers doors”, he says. “With this one in particular, the Mourvedre, he (owner Leon Koch) did not know me from a bar of soap – I got a lot of no’s also along the way – but he said ok and he gave me a go I guess”.

Eight rows of this rare and unique planting remain at Rowland Flat and from these vines is where Dean makes his much lauded single varietal wine called Old Garden. Geologists have confirmed that the Old Garden sits on what was the bottom of an ancient lake, once part of the Para River. The secret to the vines longevity is their extremely long roots burrowing over 10 meters down into the prehistoric ground.

“The roots of these vines are so deep that even on the hottest day, while every other vine in the Barossa Valley has shut down, the Old Garden’s leaves are bright and perky, tracking the sun as if each leaf is a radar”, says Dean.

Although the Old Garden is a great wine from great old vines, it still takes a great craftsman to craft such a respected wine. Dean has an undergraduate degree from Roseworthy, the internationally renowned centre for excellence in dry land agriculture and part of the University of Adelaide. Not content with just that, Dean then attained his Masters degree from California’s UC Davis, the pinnacle of America’s centre for studying oenology and winemaking.

Asked if having worked abroad (Dean has worked in Beaujolais, Provence, Bordeaux and Oregon) has allowed him to define his own winemaking style Dean exclaims. “Oh there’s no question about that. You’ve got to travel if you’re a winemaker so if you’re from the old world you’ve got to go to the new world and if you’re from the new world you’ve got to go to the old world, just to understand it. It helps you to understand what you’ve got, just hearing and reading about it isn’t enough, you’ve got to go and experience it and realise that they do certain things for certain reasons”.

Let’s consider the old and the new world. Australia has the oldest vines in the world but is regarded as new world I put to Dean. Surely it must annoy Australian winemakers to be considered old world when you are quite clearly one of the older wine producing countries of the modern day?

Dean’s reply is simple and enthusiastic. “It is true we do make wine in the ‘new world’ but we have the oldest vineyards in the world – it’s kind of an oxymoron if you like. The fact that the Barossa Valley has the oldest Shiraz, Cabernet, Mourvedre, Grenache, Semillon and Riesling vineyards in the world means that we are in fact older than the ‘old world’! I think that message is the one that we need to highlight – Australia has the oldest vineyards in the world”.

And without these great old vineyards there would be no Old Garden Mourvedre. It must be said, these wines have aged gracefully and, tasting through the different vintages with Dean you can see the passion he has for each wine and if you look closely, you can almost see Dean reminiscing over each vintage as if it only happened yesterday.  “There is a definite and obvious variation in each vintage due to the climatic conditions of each year”, Dean says. “The cooler years produce wines with more elegance whilst the warmer years give you more intense and powerful wines”.

When push comes to shove, Australia may have a reputation for making mass-produced easy drinking wines with little to no complexity but this certainly isn’t the case with Hewitson’s wines and most definitely not the case with the Old Garden Mourvedre. As Dean heads off to Shanghai for the next leg of his world tour celebrating the 160^th birthday of these terrific Mourvedre vines one is left to ponder whether were there not more winemakers with the passion and perseverance of Dean Hewitson, would not a lot more Australian wines be up there with the best wines from the rest of the winemaking world?

Hewitson wines are exclusively imported and distributed by Kedington Wines in Hong Kong and more information can be found by e-mailing them at info@kedwines.com or by calling (+852) 28989323