Tamburlaine Organic Wines

The Free Bacchus Story

Tamburlaine is a wine business that decided to become an organic one, which is a harder sequence than starting out that way. Mark Davidson and a small group of friends and relatives bought the winery in 1985. The certification came later, and it now covers everything they farm.

There are two properties and they could hardly be less alike. The original is a thirty-four hectare site in the Hunter Valley, the old, humid, deeply unhelpful corner of New South Wales where growing anything cleanly is a yearly argument with the weather. The second is ninety-three hectares at Orange, planted at eight hundred and seventy metres, high enough to change the wine altogether: cold nights, a long hang, and Chardonnay that comes out taut rather than broad. It is one of the largest certified organic vineyards in the southern hemisphere.

One thing to be straight about, because it cuts against the house. Halliday's Australian Wine Companion gives Tamburlaine five red stars, but that is a rating of the winery rather than a score for a wine, so it earns nothing here as a critic score and the row sits at the floor for it. The quality evidence that does count is show results, among them a Best Organic Wine trophy and a NSW Governor's Best in Show.

In 2015 they stopped using animal proteins to fine the wine. Nobody announces a change like that and most drinkers never think about it, but it is the difference between a bottle anyone can drink and one that quietly is not. The Reserve Orange Chardonnay is where to start, and at around forty-two Australian dollars at the cellar door it is one of the more affordable serious bottles in this cellar.