As Vasse Felix releases its 50th vintage of Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon, winemaker Virginia Willcock talks clonal serendipity, ‘lolly eaters’ and rediscovering the producer’s winemaking heritage. Richard Woodard reports. During the 1850s, what you might call a Sliding Doors moment occurred on opposite sides of the winemaking world. The precise details are frustratingly fuzzy, but grape vines from Bordeaux – specifically Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec – arrived around the same time in Western Australia and Argentina. “We don’t know for sure where the clones came from,” says Virginia Willcock, winemaker at Margaret River producer Vasse Felix. “But I was talking to Laura Catena, and they received Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec in the 1850s too. “They talk about that heritage clone of Malbec being the best-performing in Argentina, and our Malbec looks just like their Malbec – scraggly bunch, small hen-and-chicken berries. So I think we have the same Malbec material. They decided to grow more Malbec – and we grew more Cabernet Sauvignon.” That clonal material had been in Western Australia for more than a century by the time cardiologist Dr Tom Cullity planted the first Vasse Felix vines in 1967, on an eight-hectare plot close to the Wilyabrup Brook, 4km from the ocean. Research had likened the growing conditions in Margaret River to those of Bordeaux – although Willcock observes wryly: “That is not necessarily how we see ourselves now.” Dr Cullity planted Cabernet and Malbec simply because they were the only Bordeaux varieties he could lay his
This Article was originally published on The Drink Business - Fine Wine