Always a step ahead of his peers, Croser was a pioneer in two outstanding South Australian wine regions and was among the first to recognise the primacy of viticulture to wine quality.
Brian Croser is an outstanding figure in the Australian wine community, whichever way you look at him. He has been a teacher, mentor, winemaker, viticulturist, consultant and wine industry spokesman. Croser is perhaps best known as a winemaker but his most profound contribution to the betterment of Australian wine is in viticulture.
He has pioneered two outstanding wine regions, a great achievement in its own right. He was first to plant vines in the Piccadilly Valley, one of the highest, coldest and wettest parts of the Adelaide Hills, in 1979, for Petaluma sparkling wine. Nearly a quarter-century later he chose a site on the Fleurieu Peninsula, far from any existing vineyard, to plant his Foggy Hill pinot noir vineyard for Tapanappa.
The Piccadilly Valley has been Brian and Ann Croser’s home for nearly 40 years. In late 2014 they resumed control of the former Petaluma winery, now the permanent home of Tapanappa wines, as well as their daughter Lucy and son-in-law Xavier Bizot’s Terre à Terre wines.
Croser made his name as a winemaker and teacher at a time when the “cult of the winemaker” eclipsed the role of the viticulturist. Since then, the primacy of the vineyard has been recognised and the role of the viticulturist to wine quality has been belatedly acknowledged.
But it will surprise many that Croser has always been first and foremost about viticulture. Not only has site selection been critical for him in planting vineyards, but he was the first of his generation to choose vineyards in specific locations which best suited the grape varieties he wanted to grow: Clare for riesling, Coonawarra for cabernet and merlot, and Piccadilly Valley for pinot noir and chardonnay. More recently, it’s Wrattonbully for red Bordeaux varieties, and Parawa on the Fleurieu Peninsula for pinot noir. He argues persuasively that the Adelaide Hills is not cold enough for pinot noir table wine. He went instead to Parawa because it’s the coldest place in South Australia, and he and Ann didn’t want to leave the state. Given another lifetime, he would plant pinot and chardonnay in the Victoria Valley in Victoria’s Grampians.
Croser can explain at length why the viticultural methods employed in each of his vineyards is different and site-specific. This extends to planting density, a hot topic these days. He believes his company is one of the few in Australia to have a significant area of vines on 1.5 x 1.5 metre spacing. He didn’t do it just because he saw the Champenois and Burgundians do it; he gives reasons for each vineyard’s planting density, and even why it is pruned to a specific number of buds per hectare.
If there are too many buds, vigour decreases and there is too much fruit; if there are too few buds the vigour goes up and fruiting drops down. “So you have to have the right number of buds, and it’s different for every acre and location,” says Croser. “At Tiers, we run about 90,000 buds per hectare, but down at Foggy Hill, which is windier and cooler with poorer soil, we run at about 70,000 buds per hectare. And down at Whalebone (his Wrattonbully vineyard), where we have this layer of limestone that the roots struggle to get through, we run at about 30,000 buds per hectare.
“It all comes back to how you design a vineyard. At 90,000 buds per hectare, how do you get a decent spacing between shoots for ideal ventilation, light penetration, fruit exposure, leaf exposure and disease resistance? The only way is to put in more metres of canopy, and the more metres of canopy and wires and things, the further you can spread those 90,000 buds apart.
“So here on 1.5 by 1.5 metre spacing we get that separation of about 8cm between shoots. At Foggy Hill on the same spacing we get about 10cm separation between shoots, and at 30,000 buds per hectare in Whalebone we can be on about 2.7m spacing between rows. Because we have far fewer buds, we can have much wider spacing. And that really dictates how you plant a vineyard. It’s not widely understood.”
For Croser, quality has always been paramount. He would love to see Australia more focused on producing great wines, and investing more in improving quality, as he has done throughout his entire career.
*State Library of South Australia: OH 692/169 Interview with Brian Walsh by Rob Linn, 18 February 2003