Max Allen reviews three top drops from a shiraz-obsessed former chef

Adam Foster released his first shiraz two decades ago. It was a mere 100 cases of wine, made from grapes he’d bought from a vineyard in the central Victorian region of Heathcote, an area synonymous with the shiraz grape.

Foster started out as a chef, but switched to winemaking in 2002 after becoming obsessed with the bottles he tasted in the restaurants where he worked. As well as setting up his own wine label, Syrahmi, he also worked in wineries around Australia and in France’s northern Rhône Valley, where shiraz – syrah – flourishes in the granite soils of Côte-Rôtie and Saint-Joseph. Self-taught, he was keen to learn as much as he could about winemaking in general and the shiraz grape in particular.

For the first decade or so of the Syrahmi business, Foster felt the best way, certainly the most economically viable way, to survive was to buy grapes from growers across Heathcote, rather than be burdened with the costs of owning, planning and managing his own vineyard.

Then in 2014, Foster and his wife, Pip, bought a block of land on a hillside at Tooborac, in the cooler, higher, southern end of the Heathcote region, where the rugged landscape is dotted with massive granite boulders, and the soil is shot with the grainy deposits of those rocks, eroded over hundreds of millions of years.

The idea was to build a house there, which they did. But the block also had a beautiful, amphitheatre-like scoop of land in among the boulders – and if ever there was a bit of dirt that looked like it was begging to have shiraz vines planted, it was this bit of dirt.

I first saw the site when I visited Foster for a tasting in his house in early 2017. He’d stuck three different clones of shiraz into the ground just four weeks before: 3000 or so vines, planted much closer together than you’d find in most Australian vineyards, crowded into not quite an acre of land, each tender young plant protected by a white grow-guard.

Foster planted the vines so close together here because he believes this is a way to achieve greater complexity and quality in the wine. He also tends the vines by hand, laying straw mulch across the whole site to suppress weeds and provide organic matter to the soil. And he ferments and matures the wine in ceramic, egg-shaped containers, preferring to let the fruit and site express themselves without the influence of oak.

It’s an uncompromising approach, but Foster’s not averse to pushing boundaries. Another of his Syrahmi wines, the La La (the name is a nod to the cult single-vineyard Côte-Rôtie from Guigal, La Mouline, La Landonne and La Turque, collectively known as “the La-Las”), is 100 per cent whole bunch fermented shiraz from the Greenstone vineyard, in northern Heathcote, aged in a single, brand-new 500-litre barrel for a minimum of three years (the 2017 was closer to four) and then in bottle for at least two years before release.