Artful Vines

Simone Horgan continues the family tradition of crafting wines rooted in Australia’s ancient land.

The Margaret River region of Western Australia is one of the world’s most remote winemaking areas.

Nearly 300 kilometers south of Perth and 4,000 kilometers west of Canberra, it might seem an unlikely place to build an international wine business. But that’s just what the Horgan family did in founding Leeuwin Estate.

In 1969, Denis and Tricia Horgan bought a large cattle farm that was 7 kilometers from their favorite surf break. It was hard to imagine creating a winery that would export its product to countries like Japan when the town was only dirt roads and subsistence farms. But the soil turned out to be ideal for growing varietals like Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon.

Before he decided to produce wines that could rank among the world’s best, Denis was a chartered accountant working in Perth. One day in 1973, he had an unexpected visitor. His land had caught the attention of wine legend Robert Mondavi, who turned up on the property in search of the next big wine region.

“He inquired about an acquisition, and the end of the story was the start of a wonderful friendship and mentorship with Robert and his son Tim, who came out over the first few vintages and told Mom and Dad they had land capable of making incredible wines and taught them how to do it,” recalls Simone Horgan, who will return to the Club for the first time in a decade to host a wine dinner for Members at 51 East on February 5.

Leeuwin Estate produced its first commercial vintage in 1979 and is one of the five founding wineries of the Margaret River area. Today, it’s an award-winning winery—featuring dining, live music and art—that exports to 30 markets, including Japan. Like many of the world’s great wineries, Leeuwin is very much a family-run operation. It’s now into its second generation of managers, led by Simone and her brother Justin.

Several environmental factors make Margaret River special for oenophiles. The hilly, undulating property is home to some of the most ancient bedrock in the world, with Precambrian granite more than 750 million years old. As the granite crumbled over millennia, it formed free-draining gravel soil with a clay loam subsoil.

“This allows the vines to work very hard and get this wonderful concentration and depth in the quality of the fruit,” says Simone. “Because we’re a cape, we’ve got ocean on three sides, providing a gentle cooling sea breeze in the mornings and a beautiful Mediterranean climate similar to Bordeaux, but with a longer growing season. This gives us greater latitude for reds and whites and consistency across vintages.”

The winery’s philosophy centers on sustainability—it’s been a member of Sustainable Winegrowing Australia since 2011—and a focus on purity of the fruit, attention to detail and creating wines that tell the story of the land and vineyard.

“It’s all about the land and wines being grown and not made,” notes Simone. “We’re low interventionist. We make site-expressive wines with incredible balance, elegance and complexity. We break our vineyards into very small parcels and harvest each at the optimum ripening to choose its barrel oak based on the fruit profile.”

The Leeuwin Estate property comprises 668 hectares with 161 under vine. The wine lineup is led by the acclaimed Art Series range, comprising an incredibly age-worthy Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz, along with Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling. The labels feature art from the winery’s collection of more than 160 paintings by Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Other series include Siblings, with a Shiraz and Sauvignon Blanc, and Prelude, representing the estate’s first releases and more readily expressive styles of Chardonnay and Cabernet, crafted for earlier drinking.

“The Art Series wines are released at the beginning of their drinking window, and they will tell their story for a long time,” says Simone. “An Art Series Chardonnay on release is all about energy and precision. As it ages, you’ll see secondary characteristics and it will open up across the mid-palate. But its hallmark will always be the length on the palate.”
Winemakers at Leeuwin try to convey a sense of place through their vintages, but to really understand the land, you must make the three-hour trip from Perth.

“You can taste wines and you can read about wines, but when you go to the place where the wine is made to see the soil and the light and smell the land, like the flowers on our peppermint trees, you understand why the winemakers do what they do and where the wine comes from,” Simone explains. “To me, going to the place a wine is made is where you truly connect with that sensory impact of the wine.”