Sarah Fagan

Winemaker

It might seem like stating the obvious, but employing a winemaker to make the wines they like to drink is a pretty smart thing to do. You can pick a wine apart, break it down to a sum of its technical parts but without some passion, some connection to the possibilities of the grape beyond the text book characteristics, you get a product that serves the purpose and little else. Combine passion with winemaking and you can achieve poetry.

Sarah Fagan, a young winemaker working at De Bortoli’s Yarra Valley winery, is a no-nonsense kind of woman who would probably roll her eyes at the suggestion of winemaking poetry. But her work with De Bortoli’s white wines has revealed both someone completely simpatico with white grape varietals and Steve Webber’s talent for identifying winemakers with a connection to their craft beyond the technical.

Born into a farming family in Cowra, NSW, Sarah is the product of a family with a passion for good wine who, in the late 90s began to make wine themselves. As she puts it, “we always liked to drink a bit of booze and we would drink some interesting things, some Frenchies and all of that”.

It was while drinking one of the ‘Frenchies’ when she was 16 or 17 – a white burgundy to be exact – that the connection with good white wine was made. The more poetic might call it an epiphany but, as Sarah recalls it, “it wasn’t too exciting but it was completely different from any other chardonnay I’d ever tasted - my ears pricked up a bit or something”.

The chardonnay revelation didn’t immediately lead to a winemaking career. Sarah spent a year at Sydney Uni doing an Ag Science degree before surrendering to the inevitable and transferring to Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga where she “learned how to drag hoses and read a hydrometer” but “didn’t learn too much about making and drinking good wine”.

The De Bortoli connection came when her father asked Steve Webber whom he knew through wine shows about a job for his daughter. Initially Sarah was to stay for 3 months to participate in the 2003 vintage but she ended up staying until 2004 when she went to the US to do vintage in California with a wine maker who “was really into small winemaking production”. When she returned to Australia, Steve asked her to “come and help out with the whites” which she has been doing – with great success – ever since.

Concentrating on white wine has allowed Sarah to explore the intricacies of the grape she discovered at home in Cowra years before.

“I think chardonnay is a pretty bloody tidy little grape variety”, she says. “It is my favourite wine to drink, pretty much and I like it because it is a challenge - it is harder to get right than a lot of other things. I try to build texture in the wines and work with what you’ve got in the phenolics, trying to get texture without making a coarse, hard wine. It can be difficult but that is what I like about it.”