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The
David Hohnen interview
The man behind Cloudy
Bay and Cape
Mentelle makes a fresh start...
David Hohnen isn’t a
terribly extrovert person. He comes across as quiet, and quite
guarded: he’s not the sort to dominate an interview, nor to seek to
direct its course. This is quite surprising, considering what he has
achieved in his career to date. Not only was he one of the pioneers in
Western Australia’s Margaret River region, but he also had a big
hand in promoting New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc to the world by founding
the iconic Cloudy Bay winery in the
mid-1980s. Now he’s spending his time farming (sheep and a few
pigs), as well as helping his daughter Freya with the new family
winery, McHenry Hohnen. I caught up with him in Margaret River, and
then a couple of months later in London, to get a better picture of
this significant player in the antipodean wine scene.
We began by discussing the
current state of the Australian wine industry. David is proud of what
Australia has done, but thinks that the industry must now go through a
further stage of evolution. ‘Australian wines have been in the UK
for 20 years, and we’ve done a great job demystifying things. We
took wine out of the clubs of St James’ and stuck them on English
working men’s tables, without the erratic quality of wines from
Europe and at prices they could afford', explains Hohnen. 'What we are
doing now is showing that we have the equivalent of the Bordeaux and
Burgundy experience with small, regionally based estates.’
By planting its first vines
in 1969, Cape Mentelle
was one of the pioneers in the Margaret River region of Western
Australia, although the first wines weren’t marketed until 1976. It
was a collaborative effort between three families in Margaret River,
including the Hohnens, who put land together to form a farm, and the
vineyard was a small part of this. After doing a course in Fresno,
California, David returned to plant another 12 acres in addition to
the three acres of vines that were already there. But financial
difficulties meant that he had to go off to Victoria to work at
Taltarni. His brother returned from Vietnam to look after the vineyard
in his absence, and then David returned to do the 1976 vintage, the
first commercial release.
David describes the Cape
Mentelle launch as being like ‘crawling along on elbows on broken
glass’. ‘It was tougher than most people can imagine’, he
recalls. ‘We were perceived as being too expensive by the local
market. We couldn’t sell the wine. It wasn’t until we got
recognition from the eastern states that people would buy it
locally.’
Some history is in order
here. The first to plant in Margaret River was Dr Tom Cullity at Vasse
Felix, in 1967. He was ahead by two years of the next group: Kevin
Cullen and Bill Pannell (both doctors from Busselton), and then
came Cape Mentelle.
There was an awakening of
interest in table wines in Australia, and Harold Olmo from University
of California Davis came out to try to identify cool climate regions.
He spotted Mount Barker, and Forest Hill was the first winery there in
1966. As a hobby, lupin breeder John Gladstones had been studying
climate and wine, and he picked Margaret River. On the back of
Gladstone’s report, Cullity, who lived over the road from David’s
parents in Perth, decided to plant a vineyard. David’s dad was one
of the first on Cullity’s mailing list, and brought home some
extremely acidic Rieslings: the grapes had to be picked early before
the birds got them.
Birds were a major issue in
the early days of Margaret River. ‘There have been two main
developments in viticulture in Margaret River’, says Hohnen. ‘The
availability of bird netting, and cheap wire and posts for
trellising’. He describes some of his experiences with losing crop
to birds as ‘distressing’, and recalls that, ‘You couldn’t
hear for the screaming little silver eyes [the birds who did the
damage]: it was just awful. Three years out of five we lost a lot of
crop.’ These silver eyes are small birds that cause damage by
pecking a hole on every berry in a bunch. Then an Aussie entrepreneur
went to China and visited some fishnet factories and sourced
affordable netting that could be used in the vineyards. ‘Now
Margaret River is an ocean of netting at harvest time’.
Before netting was widely
available, growers were forced to pick early. Hohnen speculates that
netting may have been one of the factors behind the brettanomyces
outbreak that hit the region, beginning in 1988. As growers were able
to leave grapes to hang for longer, they’d be working with musts
richer in phenolics and with lower pH, both of which can increase the
risk. He also speculates that brett may have come down from the Swan
River region on some grapes. Another contributory factor was the
widespread ignorance of the issue. Most textbooks had very little on
brett, and analytical tools were limited to plating and culturing,
which is time consuming. The common wisdom, he recalls, is that as
long as you had adequate sulphur at bottling, any brett present
wouldn’t bloom in bottle, which he now describes as ‘bullshit’.
‘That’s why we all got whacked,’ maintains Hohnen. Cape Mentelle
had to pour away their 1997 Cabernet, and the two subsequent vintages
were also affected. ‘On the basis of the initial 1988 experience, we
contacted Mondavi and looked at their protocol’, he recalls. ‘It
was basically about hygiene. We were waiting for brett, but it still
got us.’ He thinks that the barrels are all important. ‘We import
one, twice or three times used white Burgundy barrels, and we sterile
filter at bottling. This was controversial at the time because the
anecdotal evidence was that it knocked the wine around, but we know
that the wine comes back. We love our high pH and low acidity, and we
don’t want to lose that.’
The next big thing for
Hohnen was Cloudy Bay, the iconic Marlborough winery he started that,
to this day, is still producing the definitive example of Marlborough
Sauvignon Blanc. In 1983 there was a technical conference in Perth.
Some Kiwi winemakers came down to Margaret River to taste a bit from
barrel, and left some bottles of Sauvignon Blanc: Hohnen was amazed by
the wine. ‘It was a bit sugary sweet, but the aromatics were
amazing’. In 1984 he visited New Zealand to see for himself where
these remarkable wines had come from, attending the Auckland wine
show. There he met Kevin Judd, who was then working for Selaks.
Determined to go ahead with his own Marlborough winery venture, Hohnen
raised Aus$1million in finance, at a crazy interest rate of 23%.
Within a year, the bank he had borrowed from was broke, so he
refinanced. 1985 was the first Cloudy Bay: 40 tons of grapes were
purchased and the wine was made up in Gisborne. In 1986 Judd
constructed a winery and they signed up for 120 tons a year from
Corbans. The ball was rolling.
But despite the evident
success of Cape Mentelle and Cloudy Bay, Hohnen found himself a bit
dissatisfied. ‘The company had become huge’, he says, ‘and I’d
given away all the jobs I liked doing’. He found the role of CEO
somewhat stressful, and made a plan for exit in 2000 when Veuve
Clicqout bought the venture. He stayed around for three more years
then left. ‘I never regretted it for one minute’, says Hohnen, who
officially quit Cape Mentelle in 2003.
With vineyards already in
the family, offering a wonderful resource in terms of sites and
varieties, it seemed daft not to start his own venture. In addition,
Hohnen’s daughter Freya had completed her winemaking studies, and he
ideally wanted to do something with her. He describes her as a ‘good
down to earth girl, and a good taster’, and points out that she came
top of the class in her oenology course. However, it took a few years
for Freya to decide whether or not to work with her father: she had
spells working at Vasse Felix and then Voyager Estate before deciding
to commit herself to the family business.
This brings us to the
present. McHenry
Hohnen is a joint venture, split 50/50 between David and Murray
McHenry, Hohnen’s brother in law. McHenry made his money from a pub
in Perth, and the winery that is still in construction phase, although
ready enough for the 2007 vintage to be done there, is on the Rocky
Road Vineyard site that McHenry owns. Between the two of them, they
have four vineyards, three south of Margaret River (including Rocky
Road), and one near to Cape Mentelle. In 2007 140 tons were processed
at the winery. It’s officially licenced to crush 500, but Hohnen
says he won’t grow faster than the market will permit.
You’d have thought that at
this stage in his career, Hohnen would have been tempted to take
things easy, and live a quiet life on his farm, without the
distraction of launching a new medium-sized winery. But he’s clearly
not finished yet, and after tasting
through the McHenry Hohnen range, I’d say that these wines have
something fresh to say; they’re rather unlike the wines being made
in the rest of the region, with a distinctly European elegance to
them. I don’t predict that they’ll have quite the impact that
Cloudy Bay had—after all, success stories like this usually only
come around once in every generation—but if there are enough
drinkers who admire expressivity, food compatibility and
understatement over raw power, the McHenry Hohnen wines should have a
very bright future.
Interview:
April and September 2007, published December 2007
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