A BIT About US…

HOW IT STARTED

HADDOW + DINEEN is a collaborative winemaking project by cheesemaker, Nick Haddow, and winemaker, Jeremy Dineen.

Appropriately, they met at a wine and cheese tasting in 2003, not long after Nick moved to Tasmania and started Bruny Island Cheese Co. and Jeremy had moved back home to Tas and started work establishing Joesf Chromy wines.

DINEEN:

You would be hard pressed to find someone with a deeper understanding of the complexities of Tasmanian viticulture than Jeremy Dineen. He led the winemaking team at Josef Chromy from establishment in 2005, made wine under contract and now consults for some of the better labels in Tasmania. Inspired by the intense quality of the fruit from the Yorktown Vineyard, it didn’t take much for Jeremy to talk Nick into making some wine together.

HADDOW:

Nick is the founder of Bruny Island Cheese and Bruny Island Beer. He also runs a small dairy farm in the Huon Valley. Nick has always dabbled on the fringes of winemaking – he grew up in South Australia and has spent much of his life hanging out with vignerons and winemakers. This project has given him the chance to finally get his hands dirty.

PHILOSOPHY AND VALUES

This is a passion project for the two of us. That gives us the privilege of making choices about how we grow grapes and make wine.  We are also pretty small, giving us the freedom to make wines in the style we want to, rather than bend to market demands.

The health of the environment within and around our vineyards is paramount to us and we strive to continue to improve its condition so that it can be enjoyed for many decades to come. This is particularly the case for our Yorktown vineyard, where the geology and microclimate is unlike almost anywhere else in Tasmania. Viticultural decisions are made to ensure that this site continues to produce grapes of the highest character for decades to come.

A soft hand and a respect for both varietal and site expression guides us to make wines that express considerable character. In doing so, we hope that we can contribute to the reputation of Tasmania being the home to some of the country’s most interesting wines.

OUR APPROACH TO WINEMAKING

Our approach to our winemaking is traditional and uncomplicated. Fermentation occurs naturally, our wines are not filtered or fined and when we add sulphur, we do so in minimal amounts. We are big on producing textural wines, so the ferments get plenty of elbow grease and this also informs our barrel selection.

It’s a small vineyard and the wines are made in small batches. Rather than influencing the wine through blending, we prefer to use every barrel in its entirety, so each wine is an honest representation of both vintage and site. It’s a bit like nose-to-tail winemaking.

Our core belief is that great fruit, from special places, guided by the right hands is what makes great wine. We value ‘maximum consideration’ over ‘minimal intervention’ – for every wine we produce, there are a thousand choices to be made about whether to impose ourselves or simply employ vigilant inaction.

VITICULTURE

Our grapes are sourced mostly from two different vineyards.

THE YORKTOWN VINEYARD

The main site is a single, tiny vineyard in Yorktown, near the mouth of the Tamar River in northern Tasmania. The four hectare vineyard is uniquely situated on white quartzite gravel with patches of orange clay. It was first planted to Pinot Noir in 1998 with Pinot Gris added in 2005. Jeremy was buying the fruit from this vineyard to go into the mix at Josef Chromy, but the quality and intensity impressed him every year, so when the opportunity came to buying the vineyard in 2019, he snapped it up. This is a tough place to grow grapes – the vines take up to six years to develop to the point where they can support fruit production. Given the austerity of the site, the fruit is incredibly intense, and the vines are very low yielding.

ORANI VINEYARD

We also lease a tiny vineyard in the Coal Valley, previously known as the Orani vineyard,  with 30-year-old Riesling and 20-year-old Pinot Noir vines.

Whilst we don’t own it, we manage every part of the growing from pruning to picking. This vineyard is a bit of a passion project – both of us have separate connections to the site, so when we heard it was about to be bulldozed, we staged an intervention and offered to lease it. It then took three years of hard work (and plenty of money) to bring back to Jeremy’s high standards.

Coincidentally, it’s the first place Jeremy ever picked grapes!