This is an exceptional pinot noir

Max Allen, Australian Financial Review, 20.6.24 (reprinted with kind permission)

It’s Sunday morning and there are plenty of cars parked outside the striking redbrick church in Tarrington, a small town in south-west Victoria. Constructed in the 1920s in a gothic revival style, the church’s tall, narrow steeple towers over the surrounding wide, flat farming landscape.

Ever since Lutheran migrants from Saxony settled in the area in the 1860s, there has been a place of worship of some kind here – first built of wood, then bluestone, now brick. In the 19th century, and until World War I, the town was known as Hochkirch. High church.

I’m on my way to visit John Nagorcka, who with his family grows grapes and makes wine a few kilometres down the road from Tarrington. Nagorcka’s great grandfather was one of those original Lutheran settlers, and John, now 67, grew up here on the family farm. He’s a member of the congregation, too, but today he’s opening a few bottles of his latest releases for me to taste.

Image above -The vineyard has two-metre rows, less than a metre between vines, and fruiting wire at only 60cm high. Below: John Nagorcka at his farm, which includes the Hochkirch winery.

I’ve visited the Nagorckas’ farm a few times before (they also have sheep and cattle, and grow cereal crops) and have long been a fan of the wines. The property has been farmed using biodynamic methods since 1999, and Nagorcka is an ardent, articulate advocate of this form of organics, especially when it comes to viticulture.

As I taste through the wines in the cellar door next to the winery this cold Sunday morning, I find them finer than in previous vintages, more detailed, more nuanced. Particularly the pinot noir: where once it could be quite muscular and earthy – a character I attributed to the

gravelly basalt loam soils in this part of the world – now it has more finesse, more of a transparent quality; still savoury, but lighter on its feet. Nagorcka points at some empty wine boxes from producers in Morey-Saint-Denis, Burgundy, stacked in a corner of the room.

“See that?” he says. “That’s an investment in learning how pinot noir works. It took me a fair while to understand. And I realise I didn’t understand when we started. Back then, we were making bigger, heavier wines. Whereas, in truth, pinot noir should be a light wine. A light wine that is also complex. Getting that complexity is something that we’ve been working on.”

Nagorcka has made some significant changes to the viticulture since first planting the vineyard in 1990 following industry standards: wide rows, two metres between vines, fruiting wires at chest height. He’s learnt that it’s better to grow vines closer together and lower to the ground – two metre rows, less than a metre between vines, and with a fruiting wire at 60 centimetres high. Tougher for the pickers’ backs, better for wine quality.

Harvesting decisions have also changed: whereas before he was picking pinot at 12 or 13 Baumé (a measure of sugar in the grapes that roughly equates to potential alcohol percentage), now he’s picking closer to 10 or 11. And he’s able to do this, he thinks, because of the biodynamic farming.

“My experience has been that, by using the BD [biodynamic] methods successfully, we get better physiological ripeness at lower sugar levels. And we get better acidity: you get a better sense of acidity, and the type of acidity you’re getting is different. And all those things are just fundamental to good pinot noir.”

Another change here is the involvement of the fifth generation. Of John and Jennifer Nagorcka’s four children, two are now back on the land: son Christian has been working here for the past five years after doing vintages in Europe, and daughter Gretel is home after doing a master’s degree in environmental science.

“I’ve managed, I think, to educate my kids to understand biodynamics and appreciate it,” says Nagorcka. “It’s a bit of an issue because a lot of kids of BD farmers end up leaving the farm, or, if they do stay on the land, end up converting back to conventional farming. Often, really good biodynamic farmers aren’t able to explain and give their kids ownership of the method. But here I think my kids will go to the trouble of continuing it.”

One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the label that adorns the Nagorcka family’s bottles.

Resolutely old-fashioned, it features the name of the vineyard, Hochkirch, in bold retro font, with an image of its namesake – the nearby red-brick church – and Germanic eagles emblazoned on either side.

It’s about as far from the current trend of arty, wordless, cartoon-graphic labels as it’s possible to get. And John Nagorcka likes it that way.