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Bryan Martin has packed a lot into his last 47 years, something not so obvious
from his young appearance and quiet manner. We had already taken the
Magnificent 7 photograph in Braidwood for the issue when we got together for an interview so
we were on familiar terms. Even on the dull overcast day, the
Ravensworth
vineyard looked attractive, beautifully sited in undulating hills, not far from
the Clonakilla vineyards in Murrumbateman. I arrived with my photographer
daughter Aurore, and while I took some more head shots of Bryan, she
photographed the children and dog. His small kids who had been going ‘stir
crazy’ inside on the dull day were playing outside, rugged up. We all had to
scurry inside to avoid a sharp cold shower. We sat watching the sleet slide down
the windows and talked about what had brought him to being a winemaker.
Bryan Martin : I’ve done all sorts of things. I started off as a motor
mechanic when I left school, an apprenticeship, then I got involved in music. I
was studying piano then I got involved in hospitality and went overseas, that
lead to my first involvement in wine working with a wine retailer. I was studying piano in London and working in
wine retailing. When I came back to Australia I went back into the wine trade
over here and moved to Melbourne, Tasmania – my wife and I ran a hotel in
Tasmania for a number of years working for David Farmer.
While I was in the hotel I got quite
involved in food. I guess food was something I always enjoyed but I started
cooking for a chef who had been in commercial cooking. We had our first daughter
in Tassie and when the hotel closed, we went to Melbourne. I was working part
time as a chef then looking after my daughter during the day and my wife started
working ‘educating’ in hospitality. So in a roundabout way we ended up back in
Canberra because she came back to work in a school here in Canberra at the
University. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I was just working as a chef part
time at the Hyatt. So I rang up some old friends who I worked with at Farmer
Brothers and they put me in contact with a couple of people out here in the wine
industry. I decided to start studying at Charles Sturt (University).
I did the viticulture degree and then a
wine science degree. In that time my wife and I bought the place out here with a
couple of other people, my brother and my sister and father, (and there’s other
people involved here as well.) It’s been a loose involvement in wine, but wine
education has been something I’ve been doing for quite a while teaching through
wine topics. I guess for me the reason it became wine was obviously it was an
interest, and could become a career and so in a fairly short period I went from
chef to winemaker.
FH: Was it a good course?
Bryan Martin: Very good. It
chopped and changed while I was there, but ultimately it was a very practical
wine making course and as long as you have the ability to work in the industry,
it’s a great background to what you’re doing. It certainly got me involved in
learning again. I’m still looking at other courses to do now. (The inspiration
was) my wife, because she’s always been studying. It’s something that once I
started, I enjoyed as well. She’s done about four degrees.
I think a lot of things came together in
wine for me because the wine and food were both fairly important things. I teach
a lot of wine and food matching at the moment.
FH: Where do you teach?
Bryan Martin: The University at the
International Hotel School at Barton in Canberra. My wife
Jocelyn pretty well runs that
program out there, but that’s just recently that she’s done that. I guess
my
wine making was in some ways a natural progression, things that came into my life at a time when I wasn’t sure what
I was doing the next step. So by that stage we started to make more and more of
our wine to the point where we had to start trying to sell some! Now we’re
making a reasonable amount of wine and having the connection to Clonakilla and
tend to experience things as we go. Tim and I are similar in some ways, I’ve
known Tim for a while, because we’ve both got families and we live close by and
see quite a bit of each other and working together meshes out quite well. Come
vintage we’re so busy. We’re not working tremendous hours, it’s important for us
both to be home at dinner time and either Tim or I will come back late at night
and the other will come back early in the morning and do the work. It certainly
worked well for me I think and I think for Clonakilla and Tim.
FH: Is there a tension between
your own wine making and working with Clonakilla?
Bryan Martin : I hope not.
Obviously the Clonakilla products, it’s fair to say, what we make there is worth
quite a lot of money. It’s a big brand now and the stakes are high and we make
that product with a lot of attention. I guess what my anxieties were when I made
the first wine in 2004 (which we are about to release now), what happened with
that very much concerns me, it’s going to be stuck (inaudible) as a great wine
so that is important. I’m not making much so it’s not a big issue. I’ll finish
doing the work there and I’ll do my work afterwards so at vintage time I tend to
do a bit more work. But I’ve got my brother who helps me a lot, so there’s the
two of us along with some other people that work around the vineyards, and we
get through it okay. We’re not doing the crush that Clonakilla does, we do
about 20 tonnes, so it’s still very small, compared to Hardys who currently do
about 2000 tonnes, that’s more competitive that sort of business.
FH: The Clonakilla connection
obviously doesn’t hurt?
Bryan Martin: It’s still early
days for us yet, it’s good that people like Jenny have sought us out, to find
our wines. Having a Clonakilla connection doesn’t hurt there at all, but we were
getting know for our wine before I started at Clonakilla. When the wine fanatics
ring up and I say “I work at a little winery in Murrumbateman called
Clonakilla”, they gasp, so it helps that way (laughs).
Tim’s certainly very supportive. He
suggests that I use that point more than what I do. He spends a lot of time
selling his wine, he is quite a brand marketer, promoting the brand Clonakilla.
So I guess having me in the background to be a practical winemaker there has
worked quite well, they actually don’t need someone full time all year round so
I come and go a bit. This time of the year I go in for a day or two or three
depending on what’s needed. It’s important that he continues that work and that
means that we have the time to do a lot of assessing of what we’re doing.
We’ve talked a lot about it and partake
of a lot of good wine together and apart. We both work as wine judges which you
don’t get paid for and it takes up quite a bit of your time. I probably spend a
month a year judging and Tim certainly more than that. He is in the elite of
judges now, and having that experience we go out and judge the rest of the
country’s wines which is important for how you see your wine. But also at the
same time we try and get to know the great wines of the world as well to
understand how to make good wine. You need to know what they taste like so we do
a lot of dinners here or elsewhere but Tim’s got a group of white wine nut
friends who come along with some great wines and I’ll do some food for them and
we just sit down and talk about it!
FH: Tim in his interview (Regional
Food Issue 2 P42) talked about that, the camaraderie that develops, the
importance of what happens after the judging, all those kind of things. It seems
like you couldn’t pay for those experiences.
Bryan Martin: Sure yes. We’ve had
some lovely ones. In fact we had a couple of winemakers about a month ago with
Julian Castagna from Beechworth and David and Sue Carpenter from over Lark Hill
and Tim. We have some great wines and some nice food and it’s just great. I’ve
seen some of those wines since then and they don’t seem as good as what they
were that night with the food (laughs)!
That’s important for our product - Ravensworth and the way we’ve promoted it
through the media and the internet. They’re food wines like the Sangiovese,
they’re great food wines. In Italy they wouldn’t have wine without food and vice
versa and that is the reason why I planted it. The love I had for it I want to
be able to grow it and make a wine that just goes so well with food it seems
perfectly matched
FH: That’s what I felt when I
tried your 2003 Sangiovese at Grazing, so it worked for me!
Bryan Martin: It does naturally go
with some Italian foods and they’re the foods with tomato bases or foods with
lots of olive oil in them. They seem just naturally to go well with Sangiovese.
I guess because of the studies I’ve done into the science I try and think about
why these are going together so well. What’s the chemical thing, what’s
happening in the mouth when you try all these foods together. And a lot of time,
where the wine comes from, and the food from that area, does in some ways suit
it so much better than foods from elsewhere. I guess that is why Italian wines
are so good to work with. The problem there is there’s just so many of them,
there’s 2000 varieties and there’s only a couple of them planted in Australia.
The Sangiovese is the main one, it’s the biggest planted one over there and one
that people know most about. We do the same, people grow a Marsanne which is a
Rhone variety, Viognier, Shiraz. I guess that gives you some idea of the
climates that come from in Europe are similar to what we have here.
I think Chardonnays and Pinots are very
fine flavours and they tend to go with the higher foods, but to me the Shiraz
and the Sangiovese are more rustic and suit hearty foods.
FH: I’ve developed a lot more
respect for restaurants that are matching a wine on their menu like Grazing. How
do you respond to that as a trend?
Bryan Martin: I think that’s one
thing that Jenny Mooney and Grazing have shown, I was down there a few weeks ago
and talking to them about it. When they first came here they went straight into
their Canberra district wines, with confidence. She and Ben and the other people
that work there are all very confident about Canberra wines, they certainly chop
and change the ones they have there. To me it is a confidence thing just to
stock the Canberra wines. And she’s recently got an award for the best wine list
in which is great for us as well as her. I think she finds the wines that sell
well, being a well-put together wine display, she knows she can’t sell just
anything there. So the wine list she ends up distilling is a pretty good
snapshot of Canberra wines.
There’s places in Canberra doing that as
well, and I like to think that’s something that will get stronger and stronger.
Anise are very good, before Jeff (Piper) and Justine (Kavanagh) set up
the restaurant there, they came to this district. In fact they came across me
when I released my first wine, they loved it and bought that and they’ve
cellared it and they’ve just released it now in their restaurant. That’s great
to see a wine that’s five years old on a wine list.
FH: And I suppose all your stock
has been sold?
Bryan Martin : (Laughs) That’s
long gone. We’ve got some magnums put aside for a dinner which we may do at
Anise. We do a lot of wine dinners there, we tend to go there because Jeff,
the chef there, just really knows how to put food and wine together. He does a
bit of work as a wine judge as well, and is a bit of a wine nut so he’s great at
that. I think places like Chairman and Yip and Water’s Edge and The
Boat House, they’re all really happy to sell local wines as long as there’s
the confidence that comes from the winemaker and the cellar as well.
A lot of people struggle about how they sell their wine, but I think if you do
it with passion and confidence you can sell it. It helps to win awards and
accolades and those sort of thing which we’ve done a little bit, but to me it’s
confidence in the product you have and find something different. I wonder what
people think when they are going to sell their wine what’s their point of
difference.
One of the major successes of Clonakilla
is they did something different a long time ago and the whole country’s
following them there. Every wine producer now is thinking about how they can
make a Shiraz Viognier. Now it’s something that they naturally went to when you
think about it, something quite natural to grown your own Shiraz Viognier,
they’re grown together in the Rhone valley in France. It’s been a long time,
it’s been ten years to get to the state they are now, but they have one of the
best wines in the country now. I keep coming back to Clonakilla, but it’s
something that I’m very proud to work there with Tim. They’re really nice
people, the whole family, they’re funny to work around, they’re quite frugal the
way they go about things and Tim’s parents, John and Gillian, are certainly
aware of the success, but it’s just business as usual.
FH: So do you make a Shiraz
Viognier for yourself?
Bryan Martin : We have, 2005, the
one in the barrel down here and that’s mainly because of the Viognier that
fruited for the first time this year. I guess that’s why in a sense I’ve drifted
towards Tim because even before I worked there, two or three years before that I
was down there quite often bottling, and saying “what are you doing” and tasting
barrels. He’s always been open to do that and hence we started to grow the same
varieties, a few other varieties as well, the Marsanne, Sangiovese but the
Viognier is something that does grow pretty well. I think we’re fairly lucky to
be able to grow potentially good wines.
FH: It will be good to see how it
goes.
Bryan Martin : Essentially it’s been made
exactly the same way as Clonakilla, it was done as another batch there, it’s
been treated the same way. What it’s going to express is that of a different
vineyard, a couple of kilometres away, a bit lower and a different aspect so it
will be interesting to see what happens.
I’ve tasted it a couple of times now,
just barrel samples. You probably find more and more local producers going down
that track, it has surprised me that we don’t get the local wineries coming
through to see what we’re doing. Tim’s quite open to that. He’ll go out and
promote the district above his wines, because he believes that a strong district
also helps his wine. He’s very humble about his success.
FH: And you’re both part of the
local wine makers’ group.
Bryan Martin : The CDVA (Canberra
District Vignerons Association). We’ve actually got our AGM tonight. Tim’s the
president, I guess he guided the group in trying to benchmark what they do here
because they try to a lot of varieties. Last week we were looking at some of
these varieties like Viognier and Sangiovese, Pinot Gris and Temperanillo,
basically trying to work out what does grow here and trying to look at the great
wines in that style. We’ve done a lot of varieties now. So Tim’s taken it from
the point of view that if you look at the best, you can see what the potential
is and what you can produce yourself.
FH: Is it hard trying to pull a
whole lot of individual egos?
Bryan Martin : No, there’s less of that
now because we used to encompass marketing as well and that’s where it was
really contentious. So it separated and there was another group that was
developed that was to do all the marketing of the district. All we do is taste
wine, do wine tech sessions about growing and production issues - farms making
wine, always looking at it from the wine side of things rather than the grape
growing, what can we do in the vineyard to make better wine.
I guess people are finding from the
better wines in the country, they are realising that it comes from fruit, the
fruit is everything, watching how you grow the fruit and that is of utmost
importance so it has tended to bring it forward to organics and the Carpenters
(Lark Hill) heading towards biodynamics so it’s a high input way of going about
it, more expensive, but the vines seem to make better wine.
FH: Anything you’d like to say
about the future of Ravensworth, where you want to go?
Bryan Martin: I guess what you
want to do is be able to sell wine with confidence and that sort of thing.
Ultimately we’re not making much wine here so it’s not a huge demand to sell it,
but it isn’t an easy market. I guess getting our label out there as a quality
producer is the main aim, looking at things like export and larger markets like
Sydney and Melbourne, but a lot of people are being picked up by a distributor
to do that. Ultimately I think the benefit of what we have as a small producer
is that the person that grows and makes the wine sells it.
 Hopefully what people are realising out
there in the market, is that rather than having some dreadful marketing person
come and place their wine, you’ve got the person that made it, so this current
phase of our business is very important. There’s quite a few people involved in
it but ultimately it’s up to me to get out there and sell it.
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