The New Wave of the Yarra Valley

Working in the hospitality trade, you get used to doing all sorts of things that one might deem odd. Like blind tasting wines at eight in the morning. And going to bed just as people are getting up for work. And having an unhealthy obsession over the technical specs of wine openers.

The strangest of these oddities for me, however, must have been the seemingly irrational decision to pack up my entire life in Singapore, and travel six thousand or so kilometres away from my breakfast routine of kaya toasts and kopi o’s, from the heart of metropolitan Singapore to the heart of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung country, in the Yarra Valley.

A landlocked agricultural zone that once planted varieties such as “black cluster” and “sweetwater”, names that more closely resembled those of weed strains than grapes, the Yarra Valley now houses over 100 wineries. Imagine that. A hundred different expressions. From mouth-watering, tightrope-balancing acts of Chardonnays to flint-driven Pinot Noirs. As anyone who has been to the Valley can attest, it has a proven ability to produce fruit that holds its own even against a backdrop of internationally renowned regions.

Behind the Curtain

So there I was in the courtyard of a winery, spending twelve hours a day pressure-washing fruit bins under the blistering Australian summer sun. The blazing heat wasn’t all I had to endure either. There was also the stench of clearing out spent grape marc that had been rotting in the sun since the previous harvest. Oh, and the spiders, so many spiders.

Yet, there was nowhere else I’d rather be. Because you see, up until this point, my only achievement and interaction with the world of wines was having attained a Certified Sommelier certification with the Court of Master Sommeliers. I am still in the nascent stages of my wine journey and so thought that I owed it to myself to spend a season taking a peek behind the curtains, to see how the sausage is made (so to speak).

You’d think that I’d be wiling my days away soaking in the picturesque scenery of the Valley, where rolling hills are bursting with harvests. Instead, I found myself on Hunter Road in Healesville, in the heart of an industrial park which tracked with the character of the scruffy-looking, heavily tatted man with the peppery language of a spice-driven sailor I was working for, Jayden Ong.

The Man Behind One Block

Hailing from Western Australia, Jayden Ong is part of a new wave of outsiders revitalising the Valley with laser-focused ambitions. He first set foot into Melbourne on a holiday in 1998 and has stuck around ever since. However, his vinous infatuation first began at the now-defunct Melbourne Wine Room, which he cites as being instrumental to his wine education.

Later, together with restaurateur guru Andrew McConnell, he opened their first wine restaurant concept Cumulus Inc. on Flinders Lane in 2008. Barely two years after the opening of what proved to be one of Melbourne’s best-known restaurant groups, Jayden then went on to enrol himself at Charles Sturt University where he pursued a degree in oenology. By 2010 he had launched his first vintage under his own label “One Block”, adding ‘vigneron’ to an already impressive lineup of titles.

Witnessing Jayden pouring wines and running food to tables at the cellar door felt akin to seeing Prince playing a gig in a dive bar. To work under his tutelage and unforgiving work ethic, I had little choice but to adopt an equally unrelenting attitude. Vintage days regularly started at 7am. And after a pot of batch-brewed coffee, it was the start to an eighteen-hour marathon of scrubbing winemaking equipment, sorting through berries and climbing wine barrel racks to prime empty barrels to be filled with wine later.

Every day seemed to be the same and yet nothing alike. You never know what’s in store for you. Barrels could bulge and crack, leading to a mad scramble to rack off the wine within into another barrel, and congratulations, you’re not having lunch until four o’clock in the afternoon. Or perhaps the harvest delivery that was expected to arrive at noon may only reach the winery at dusk instead and then all of a sudden there go your dinner plans.

But mere tenacity is not all that’s required of a winemaker.