Breaking the rules

You won't find Bella Ridge wines in your local bottle shop, but you will find them on the list - and on the pour - at some of the country's top restaurants including Attica, Quay, Vue de Monde, Rockpool and many more.

"We took our wines out of bottle shops a couple of years ago," says winemaker Alon Arbel. "They didn't really 'fit in' with mainstream retail styles. But sommeliers understand them. They get what we're trying to do."

"We" is Israeli-born Arbel and his West Australian wife Jodi, who together bought an old vineyard in the Swan Valley, north of Perth, in 2003. Arbel studied oenology at Curtin University but quickly realised the wines he loved and wanted to produce - low-intervention, oxidatively handled, traditional warm-climate styles - weren't what was being taught at wine school. "For years I'd been tasting a lot of Australian wines and although they were often really pretty and forward, I felt they lacked the texture less-manipulative, oxidative winemaking brings," he says.

So at Bella Ridge Arbel started doing what he wanted, instead of what he'd been told was right: not irrigating the vineyard for example, and not adding acid to the wine, even though the Swan Valley is one of Australia's hottest wine regions.

The Bella Ridge family, from left: Tal, Alon and Jodi Arbel, Jodi's mum Lois Pass, Ella Arbel and Jodi's dad Frank Pass.

"People thought we were mad," he says. But the roll call of restaurants that now proudly stock the wine is proof they were anything but crazy.

Another reason sommeliers love Bella Ridge is that the couple produce a wide range of food-friendly styles, from kyohu, a pink Japanese grape unique to their vineyard that produces a soft, sweet, vanilla-scented table wine and a remarkable - if bizarre - floor-aged kyohu that tastes like a cross between fino sherry and mandarin liqueur, to a seriously savoury, grape-pulpy white trebbiano made from an Italian neighbour's old vines.

The best wines, though, in my opinion, are a wonderful barrel-fermented tempranillo rose, a stunning white chenin blanc (both from the Bella Ridge vineyard) and an outstanding red grenache made using grapes sourced from another old vineyard in the Swan.

"The rose," says Arbel, "is everything I learned not to do at wine school to make rose: six months in old barrels, on lees, no sulphur dioxide, no acid additions, released when three years old." It is unconventional but ravishing: pale bronze colour, wild hedgerow fruit like rosehips, a creamy texture.

The chenin blanc may well be Australia's best: the current vintage, 2009 (like the rose, about $24 via mailing list), is a mix of elderflower perfume, rich, nutty complexity and waxy green apple tartness. The first, the 2004, is settling in for a long cellar life. And the 2006 grenache ($46) would give the best from Barossa or southern France a nudge: it's a brilliant example of the grape - like catching flavour-glimpses of cinnamon sticks and vanilla beans amid a cloud of powdered dried blood plums.

Bella Ridge's mailing list is worth signing up to if you're interested in characterful, deeply individual wines - and buying them the old-fashioned way.

bellaridge.com.au

Source: The Australian, 8 June 2013