Taras Ochota: Australia’s master of minimum-intervention wine

It’s not often that a visit to a winemaker starts with a bearhug and ends with a frog in a sunhat.

Yet our slightly startled party of journalists have barely got a foot in the door before Taras Ochota is making with the full grizzly, warmly wrapping a khaki-clad arm round our shoulders. With his slender frame it’s like being enmeshed in a rotating clothesline.

Talkative, laconic and self-deprecating, Ochota does not act like one of the Big Stories of Australian wine. But he is.A leading light in the country’s burgeoning minimum-intervention wine movement, a recent 12-year vertical of his wines in Adelaide was one of the hot-ticket events of the wine year Down Under.For acolytes it was a chance to swoon at the feet of the master, and for sceptics to see whether the wines could last the distance. For the man himself it was a nerve-wracking event – his entire winemaking philosophy presented for examination.He needn’t have worried. As David Sly’s tasting notes (below) reveal, the 2011 and 2010 wines are still lithe, sleek and athletic, and all the wines from the past nine vintages show that trademark Ochota Barrels perfume and grace.

Defining ‘deliciousness’

The difficulty is in finding out how he does it. Ochota is wary of talking up what he’s doing, preferring to play the part of the wide-eyed ingénu. So ask him about his winemaking ethos and you’ll end up with a sentence like ‘Grow beautiful grapes, stick it in [the barrel], go on holiday, come back refreshed, put the whole puzzle together, bottle it and release it.’

Stylistically, he uses the word ‘delicious’ a lot to describe his wines, which is interesting. It’s not a word that could have been readily applied to too many Australian reds, in particular, down the years, where heft and power were more common.

These are wines with subtlety and treble, rather than pounding bass and volume. Given that Ochota spent his early years in a punk band, the irony probably isn’t lost on him.

‘We are not trying to do anything fancy. We want to be able to drink glass after glass and wake up feeling beautiful,’ he says. ‘We are not solving world peace – just trying to make something delicious.’

For Ochota, this trademark ‘deliciousness’ is heavily tied into a natural approach in the vineyard. He only works with organic vineyards, though, typically, hasn’t bothered with getting them certified because he ‘hates paperwork’.

‘Having symbiotic bugs and plants all working together actually makes life easier,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to kill things – they all work together. I don’t want to eat chemicals.’

These vineyards are typically old and picked early. ‘My picking is always based on acidity because we don’t add it,’ he says. ‘I’m just trying to make something light and pretty. We love the wet-pebble minerality that early picking brings.’

That minerality is maybe not so much a function of the soil type, then? Ochota pauses and strokes his beard thoughtfully.

‘A lot of our vineyards have rocks in the soil and I think they contribute to the style,’ he says eventually, ‘but I don’t know. I’ve been making wine for 28 years and I still don’t know what I’m doing.’

This is a very Taras Ochota answer. But I’m not sure I believe him. You don’t, after all, get to make wine for the best part of three decades – including a spell for a big Swedish importer – without some idea of which way is up.

The time in Europe brought him two things: a wider awareness of European wine, and a realisation that he no longer wanted to make big volumes. It’s where the ethos and the creative vision of what was to become Ochota Barrels crystallised in his mind.

Winemaking ethos

Just as he has strong ideas about what he wants to do in the vineyard, so he has a very definite ethos in the winery. Essentially a large garage 10 seconds walk from his front door, it’s decidedly low tech – barrels, a large plastic fermenting vat, forks and hoses. The only lab is his old dog.

There’s no destemmer because ‘it takes a lot of effort to clean’ and the most expensive pieces of kit appear to be a surfboard and a stereo. Temperature control is achieved by moving vessels into the sun to warm them up, with the cool Adelaide Hills autumn keeping fermentation below 35°C degrees.

He uses a wide range of techniques – ‘whole bunch, destemmed, crushed, crushed with stalks back in, carb mac [carbonic maceration], mixtures of all in tiny half-tonne ferments kept separate.’

Then, perhaps, comes what for Ochota might be the most important part of the process. ‘I go on holiday with the family, let my soul and the barrels reset surfing in the Maldives or something, then come home, climb the barrels and put that whole puzzle together which started back at bud burst.’

This might sound like some uncontrolled free-wheeling hippy philosophy, but Ochota takes a hard line on cleanliness in the winery: ‘you have to be when you push things to the edge like we do’.

He’s happy to use small amounts of sulphur, too. ‘A little bit of brett [brettanomyces], sulphide or VA [volatile acidity] is ok – sometimes amazing for complexity. But the tiniest bit of mousiness is absolutely destructive organoleptically. I find it bizarre that you’d do all that hard work for a year, then kaboom! Why would you risk that?’

Ochota is interrupted in his pontifications by the excited arrival of his two small children, running round the huge wooden kitchen table carrying a sunhat with a frog in it.

‘You know,’ he muses, ‘I’m just trying to raise children and have a nice life.’

For the rest of us, the wine, it seems, is just a bonus.

David Sly reviews the Ochota Barrels wines