Crawford River is off the beaten track—on the road to nowhere, as Bee Thomson puts it—yet lovers of elegant, soulful, deftly balanced wines make a beeline to this second-generation label because they know precisely what it stands for.

Much of the credit goes to Bee’s worldly parents, John and Catherine Thomson. John was the visionary who planted the vines in Condah in what is now southwest Victoria’s Henty region in 1975.

In one of Australia’s chilliest pockets for grape-growing, there wasn’t much besides the sparkling varieties planted by Karl Seppelt in the ’60s to suggest that this would be a goer. Thomson Sr’s hunch that he had slopes on auspicious soils was confirmed by late legend of viticulture Kym Ludvigsen, but he essentially ploughed his own furrow from day dot.

The estate has since carved out a first-rate reputation for Riesling so sublime that it tends to overshadow the superb Cabernet Franc, uncannily good Cabernet Sauvignon and fine Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon blend that also grow here.

I’ve been fortunate to have a bit to do with the Thomsons, initially because of my love of Riesling. They are deeply connected with the global Riesling family and were a key player in the Frankland Estate-spearheaded Riesling Downunder events I had a small hand in organising in 2015 and 2018 because of my role at German wine specialist CellarHand. On the global Riesling front, one of the vintage experiences cited by Bee was with Emrich-Schönleber in Germany’s Nahe region.

Bee’s husband, Cameron Kidd, earns a mention late in the interview. This fine fellow runs one of Melbourne’s best wine merchants, Rathdowne Cellars—hence her access to a smorgasbord of fine wine styles. Aside from Cam, this interview involves a lot of ruminations on family.

We are told that John Thomson is fanatical about phenological ripeness, which warrants a bit of explanation. When it comes to ripe wine grapes, there are various indicators one might use. Sugar ripeness is when the sugars in the berry have reached a point (hopefully before the invigorating acids have dropped below desired levels) where they suggest ideal maturity. Flavour ripeness refers to the point where the flavours in the berry and its skins appear complete, with no underripe (bitter and vegetal) or overripe (cooked or baked) flavours. Phenological ripeness is taken by some to be even truer: when the phenols (complex molecules including the skin tannins) lose their astringency and appear to mesh and melt rather than snap and bite on the palate. Even in white wines, where tannins play a far lesser role, phenological ripeness lends a feeling of effortless resolution in the flavours and texture. Some winegrowers say there’s “only one ripeness”, and ideally, there is: full flavour with sugars and acids in perfect harmony while the tannins are ripe and resolved. Well, that’s the grail…

Belinda also uses the term Baumé when talking about ripeness. A degree Baumé is a unit on the hydrometer scale for measuring liquid density, which can be used to indicate sugar levels in grapes and therefore give an indication of ripeness. One other technical term Bee uses is “malo”, meaning malolactic conversion. This is generally a natural and desirable process in red winemaking; it is merely the timing of it with Bee’s Cabernet Sauvignon that temporarily caused a furrowed brow. You can learn more about malolactic conversion by checking out my post on episode 18 of the podcast.

Skins—and the amount of time the wine spends in contact with them—are a focal point of the 2022 Crawford Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon that Belinda liked so much. At the risk of stating the obvious, the grape skins are central to most red winemaking; that’s where the colour, most of the tannin and much of the flavour come from. However, the length and timing of skin contact can vary, as will its effects, depending on grape variety and other conditions in the fruit and cellar. The grapes can have pre-fermentation maceration (also known as aqueous maceration or cold soaking), maceration during (partial or complete, depending on when the juice is drained) fermentation, and post-fermentation maceration. Like everything in winemaking, there is no ideal “time on skins”, and effects (amid evolving interplay with other compounds and their interactions) vary and shift. What Bee observes with this particular wine is that the evolution she observed, up to the point when she chose to take the wine off the skins, was exciting from a taste and tactile point of view—and it surprised her, as special wines often do.

In New Zealand, Bee discusses her work with Claire and Mike Allan, the founders and erstwhile owners of Huia in Marlborough’s Wairau Valley. The Spanish grape variety she mentions is Verdejo. Rueda is its most famous home, in the vicinity of which Bee’s adventures in northern Spain took place. The enormous Spanish winery she namechecks is Campo Viejo, which was last year offloaded by drinks giant Pernod Ricard.

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