Passing the baton at Jacob's Creek

Jacob's Creek is one of those brands that we can always rely on - it's always there, you never have a problem getting hold of a bottle in times of need and the wines, in my experience - whatever the price - have always been pretty darn decent.
It's such a huge brand, such a phenomenally successful business, that you'd be forgiven for assuming the production was more "factory" than "personal".
But for chief winemaker Philip Laffer, the past 20 years have been a personal endeavour. He is handing his role to counterpart Bernard Hickin, himself a 34-year veteran at Jacob's Creek, in order to concentrate on representing the Creek on several industry bodies and in a new advisory role with the global technical group for Pernod-Ricard.
China features prominently on his horizon. "We are developing our own wine company in China in an area just south of Inner Mongolia," Laffer says. "It's about 1000km west of Beijing. The climate is dry and, until they diverted water from the Yellow River, it was actually considered wasteland.
"We're getting used to incredibly hot summers and freezing cold winters, so we'll have to bury the vines in the winter to keep them alive."
Laffer is recognised as an industry legend in terms of his involvement in driving the development of Australian wine and his career reached new heights earlier this year when he received the Maurice O'Shea Award for his contribution to the Australian wine industry.
"I'm pleased we consistently concentrated on quality and style - rather than just volume," Laffer says. "We could have produced a hell of a lot more Jacob's Creek in those early years by making something of lower quality and making a lot of money, but it would've been ultimately a death knell for Jacob's Creek. It's been a fascinating 20 years and I'm particularly proud of where we've taken chardonnay.
"Jacob's Creek changed the whole concept of chardonnay in Britain. It was the wine that turned the British on to drinking chardonnay and we were selling close to a million cases of chardonnay in Britain at its peak. It was a style of wine Europeans hadn't seen before, with an emphasis on fruit, solid oak intensity and some creamy, malolactic character and it was a bigger Aussie style that the British market loved.
"But we've evolved our style to the changing nature of consumer preferences to a cleaner, fruit-forward elegant style."
Hickin's fascination with wine began when he was 17 and visiting a mate who worked in a winery north of Adelaide. He enrolled in Roseworthy College's agricultural science and oenology course and, five years later, in 1976, landed his first job as assistant winemaker for Orlando. That was the same year as the first Jacob's Creek Shiraz Cabernet Malbec (1973 vintage) was launched.
Keeping it in the family
If you're not on the Ata Rangi mailing list already then get organised. I crack up every time I read their newsletters because far from spouting on about their wines you get a hilarious rundown of all the family high-jinks.
Ali's talented 12-year-old is now a star sportsman, one teenager is an aspiring poet and another is studying at Lincoln and milking cows (just like her dad, Clive, did in the 70s) to earn the cash to realise her dreams. Plus their golden Labrador, Rata, got a mite matey with Larry McKenna's "old bounder" chocolate Lab, Milo, from Escarpment Vineyard, and together they produced a black pup resembling a lump of 70 per cent Dark Ghana.