Brimming with pioneering spirit

Ask any winemaker about their greatest ambition and most will answer with a predictable mixture of wine talk and marketing-speak. Their favourite words are unique, innovative and different, because everybody wants their wines to be extraordinarily different from everybody else's.

But the fact is that most New Zealand wineries survive on a steady diet of sauvignon blanc and pinot noir and most of their Australian counterparts get by on chardonnay and shiraz. So, it was refreshing to spend three days at Brown Brothers winery in Milawa, Victoria, Australia, and not once hear the word unique nor have a single drop of shiraz pass my well-sated lips.

When visitors to Ross Brown's winery ask him which wines to buy if they want to start a wine cellar he recommends SMC; a red first made by his grandfather in the 1950s. The acronym stands for shiraz, mondeuse, cabernet sauvignon. And to prove that the wine ages well, Brown hauled out four bottles of SMC from 1976, 1981, 1998 and one yet to be released from 2004 at his winery's annual wine weekend in mid-November, last year.

When SMC was first made at Brown Brothers in the middle of last century, many Australian winemakers were mixing the little known French grape variety, mondeuse, with shiraz but rarely did they add cabernet sauvignon.

The Brown family pioneered an offbeat version that emphasised mondeuse's high acidity and firm tannins with cabernet sauvignon's backbone. The only rub being that the older versions of these wines are slightly sweaty.

Most wine drinkers love these savoury flavours but those intolerant to the subtle wine fault that is brettanomyces will find these wines less to their liking. Brettanomyces, known colloquially as brett, is a yeast that imparts, to varying degrees, a savoury flavour in wine. Many people like the taste and do not recognise it as a fault so it is a picky personal gripe but one that is valid if Brown Brothers SMC is to age as well as it could.

Experimentation with new and different grape varieties is as important at this winery as their ever-expanding production of pinot grigio and pinot gris (two different wine styles made from the same grape variety), chardonnay and shiraz. The wines I enjoyed most were their sangiovese, tempranillo, arneis, roussanne and viognier.

These and other experimental wines are made in a large yellow building behind their stainless steel tank farm, on which a small, unobtrusive sign says Kindergarten Winery. This is the playground in which Brown Brothers winemakers experiment with new and different grape varieties, of which they trial at least four each year.

Their most successful experimental wine ever developed is tarrango; Australia's best known Beaujolais-styled red which wine drinkers lap up in Australia, New Zealand and everywhere else it goes.

Their least successful experiment was semillon, which was not lapped up at all but overlooked entirely by drinkers who opted instead for the steely, classic dry white semillons from the Hunter Valley north of Sydney.

Nebbiolo also failed to make the grade. It sold only by the bottle at the cellar door after people had already enjoyed a glass or three with lunch at the winery restaurant. Rumour has it that a new clone of the Italian nebbiolo grape is soon to be planted in Australia, so it may one day be trialled again at Brown Brothers winery.

Last year's wine weekend at Brown Brothers in Milawa, Victoria, Australia, was not only a sunny Spanish-themed fiesta of great paella, tortilla and churros; interesting wines; talented flamenco dancers and scantily clad sexy Spanish male guitarists. It was a celebration of 120 years since the first vines were planted on the family's home vineyard and winery site and it was a time of mourning for Peter Brown, who died unexpectedly in a fatal motorbike accident a week before.

In the past two years, both of the brothers' parents passed away, so the winery today is run by just two of the four brothers who champion individuality and differences in wine as much as they sate Australians' palates with well-known wines.