Cullen Wines: Anniversaries, legacies and new releases

Stepping into the shoes of a renowned matriarch to take over a pioneering family business is not easy. Especially if that matriarch is Diana Madeleine Cullen of Cullen Wines in Margaret River.

But if anyone was going to follow in such revered footsteps – and forge new paths – then it was going to be Vanya Cullen, the youngest of Di’s six children, who worked alongside her mother for 20 years.

Sharing enquiring minds, independent spirits and prodigious energy, mother and daughter loom large in the relatively short history of this Western Australian winemaking region.

Scroll down for tasting notes and scores of five new Cullen releases plus five library vintages of Diana Madeleine

A constant presence

Di and her husband Dr Kevin John Cullen founded Cullen Wines in 1971. While Kevin (honoured in Cullen’s flagship Chardonnay) was juggling working at Busselton hospital with research and his own medical practice, Di oversaw the wine business. She planted the vineyard, produced and promoted the wines and indeed the region itself – she was a founding member of Margaret River Wine Industry Association.

Even when Vanya became chief winemaker in 1989, then managing director in 1999, she says Di was a constant presence at the winery. ‘She was there daily until a month before she passed on 4 March 2003. Mum was amazing. Every day, she arrived at 7.30am, never late, and always well dressed, with matching scarf, pants, shirt, belt and shoes. After work she would tend the vines.’

In 1999, Di was named a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in The Queen’s Birthday Honours ‘for service to the development of viticulture and the wine industry, particularly in the Margaret River region.’ Kevin received his AM, for services to medicine and wine, in 1994, two weeks before he died.

In 2000, Di had the distinction of being seated to the Queen’s right, when the monarch visited Busselton. ‘Mum was a royalist; it was one of the best days of her life,’ recalls Vanya, who received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in King Charles’ Birthday Honours in June 2023 – something she says her mother would have loved.

Determined pursuit

Vanya admires the King’s ‘long-term support of the environment – organics and trees – even when it was unpopular’. As Cullen is one of Australia’s foremost biodynamic pioneers, it strikes a chord.

‘It has been a struggle – not always pleasant – being biodynamic. I just don’t understand why people get uptight about cow manure and constellations, or why we have to prove anything.’ It should be for those using chemicals to make their case, contends Vanya.

Her parents met with scepticism when they planted some of Margaret River’s first vines to go into commercial production. Locals asked Di: ‘What are you doing, putting sticks in the ground?’

But history speaks for itself and, by 1981, Di’s determined pursuit of ‘her Bordeaux dream’, as Vanya puts it, had created the now iconic blend which took her name in 2001.

Before Bordeaux and Burgundy became so expensive, Di and Kevin regularly opened big-name bottles, including buying Vanya first growths and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti for her birthday. ‘It was about benchmarking our wines with the best,’ says Vanya. ‘I was lucky living through that era, which has been a sustaining influence on Cullen.’

These were also shared at lively family dinners with guests, where her well-travelled and well-read parents would ‘debate about the environment, women’s rights, indigenous rights, health, education and politics.’

Always open to new ideas, Di was ‘adventurous, a lover of new technology and change’ says Vanya, who says her mother was not only the first person in Western Australia to plant Merlot and Cabernet Franc, but her oaked Sauvignon Blanc won an inaugural trophy at the Perth Wine Show and she also pioneered crossflow filter trials in Australia.

Sustainable approach

An environmentalist, Di campaigned to stop mining on Margaret River’s coastline and Tasmania’s Lake Pedder from being flooded by the Hydro Electric Commission. She also experimented with seaweed vineyard applications and vine posts made from shipmast locust trees. And in 1998, she and Vanya started the conversion to organic viticulture.

‘We worked well together because we both cared for and believed in sustainability,’ says Vanya. ‘Mum’s mantra was always “quality, not quantity”.’ Cullen was Australia’s first certified carbon neutral winery in 2007.

Despite her mother’s scientific background as a physiotherapist, she also studied natural childbirth in Paris and ‘had an intuitive way of being in the world’. Similarly, although Vanya was the first in the family to study oenology, she takes great stock in ‘what you learn over a period of time, working and living on the land, and from ancestral knowledge’.

It is a reference to learning from her mother, but also traditional farming. The Wardandi people, the traditional owners of the land on which Margaret River lies, observed the relative position of the constellations and other natural rhythms: ‘they understood the world is not revolving around our schedule’. This way of being has evolved and become a strong part of the Cullen brand, adds Vanya.

Future legacy

Following Di’s death in 2003, when ‘we needed to clarify who we were to the world and where we were travelling’, Vanya and the Cullen team built on Di’s ‘quantity, not quantity’ mantra. The values of ‘quality, integrity and sustainability’ have since driven the business forward and the wines have blossomed.

For Vanya, biodynamic certification in 2004 and no additions since 2006 (save for low sulphur) account for ‘the perfect physiological ripeness and sense of completeness’ of later vintages of Diana Madeline. ‘You see the details and shape of the wine – the fine tannins, acid-line and fruit – more clearly, because you are not taking anything away,’ she explains.

Vanya is quietly confident that, if she were here, ‘mum would have loved everything’.

Cullen new releases plus five library vintages of Diana Madeleine

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