Opening up your very early wines has to be a vulnerable experience.
There your babies are, with all their foibles, looking creaky/great. Not that I’d know how this feels, of course, because I tipped out my student wines in disgust (they were junk and deserved it). But I can at least guess this is how Alex Head felt opening every Head Wines Grenache he’s ever made for us over lunch recently.
He didn’t need to worry; those early wines looked great.
Alex and I have been friends for twenty-odd years now, harking back to our old Sydney wine retail days when we’d go out and drink Burgundy that we couldn’t afford. I’ve also seen some of the very early, largely unreleased Head Wines releases right through to the vintages, so this wasn’t an unfamiliar exercise, more a great opportunity to track how the wines changed.
There’s been plenty of stylistic evolution here, too. The Head Wines story starts back in 2006, when Alex decided he wanted to become a winemaker. He’d spent years working for the legendary Ultimo Wine Centre and then at Langton’s (back when it was good), and was a huge Rhone fan, so the Barossa was a natural starting point for winemaking.
Initially, however, it was a quest to make great, savoury Shiraz that was the focal point. Then, in 2009, he started working with Marco Cirillo in Vine Vale and couldn’t understand why Grenache wasn’t the most important wine in the Barossa (which is not hard when you spend some time in Marco’s amazing 1848-planted vineyard).
Alex was thus convinced that he was going to make a Chateauneuf take in the Barossa, and the Head Wines Old Vine Grenache was born. The inaugural 2009 release also used fruit from Marco’s vineyard, which was matured in a reconditioned 100-year-old barrel from Chateau Yaldara. That 2009 was warmly received (from my hazy memory), and by the following year, Alex had secured fruit from the old Greenock Farm property (now Alkina) and was shortly taking all the old vine fruit off that estate.
Over the years, the Head Wines Grenache story has grown to the point where Alex was taking fruit from 10 different old-vine Barossa Grenache vineyards. That has now slimmed down to 3-6 growers, with a shift also from Barossa Valley floor vineyards to more Eden Valley fruit.
That’s not the only change – in 2011, he introduced a rule that he wouldn’t add or remove anything from these wines (except for sulphur), embracing wild ferments in old oak (except for 2016, which saw some new wood) with no fining or filtration. There have also been subtle shifts in production methods, undoubtedly influenced by some of the winemakers Alex has worked with over the years, including Marco Cirillo and Damien Tscharke.
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