“People began to wonder whether we possessed some innate essence that might be discovered by peeling away layers of our surface. Or maybe there was nothing innate, and we were always in the process of self-discovery, self-creation and revision. For some, this manifested as a kind of endless drifting and searching; others found the possibility of claiming one’s identity empowering. But we were all in search of the same thing, that quality that made you yourself.” Hua Hsu, Stay True
I’m writing this a week after Black Friday. The term is apt in the wine landscape—a bleak deluge of discounts, a blizzard of contextless scores. You can bet Andrew Marks wouldn’t have been scouring the web for deals; he’ll have been in the vineyard. “My understanding of the psychology of sales and marketing is not the greatest because I’m not a very…”—the phrase hung in the air as he stood before me attired admirably shabbily, even for a winemaker—“I’m not someone who buys a lot of shit. I can never quite understand that.”
It was mid-October, and Black Friday was still a twinkle in the rapacious retailer’s eye. We were talking about the challenge of realising a pair of distinct, super-premium Pinots from a single site that produces one of Australia’s finest and most singular wines. Typically, Andrew applied serious thought and the utmost respect, for vineyard and consumer, to the task. And typically, he triumphed—although on this and other matters, he'll take no credit nor slow his pursuit of progress. Though he’s earnest, he’s also enjoying it; that’s also held sacred at Gembrook Hill. And when the storm of pre-Christmas offers subsides, leaving eroded value as it goes, it’s comforting to know that something of rare and enduring worth will live calmly on in the southern reaches of the Upper Yarra.
In the teeth of resistance
As with the best wine stories, there was no air of inevitability about Gembrook Hill’s rise to greatness. Andrew’s dad, Ian Marks, adored nature all his life and did a year of agricultural science in Armidale, NSW, straight out of school. But Ian’s father was a dentist, and his father, too. The expectation was that he’d join the family practice and he duly did, fixing teeth on Collins Street, slap-bang centre of the CBD and far from vines.
One thing about being a city dentist is that you peer into many well-connected mouths, some of which speak kind words into influential ears. One of them invited Ian and his wife, June, to Government House for a spot of tennis with Reg and Bertina Egan, a cultured couple of Francophile gastronomes who’d kicked off the Yarra Valley’s renaissance by planting Wantirna Estate in 1963. They hit it off immediately and were soon hanging out regularly over food and wine in a tight circle of friends that included John and Marli Middleton of Mount Mary (established 1971) and Peter and Margaret McMahon of Seville Estate (1972).
Given the company, it’s unsurprising that fly-fishing foodie Ian would yearn for his own slice of the outdoors. He didn’t mind where; he effectively drew a circle around Melbourne, and he and June started hunting for a site. The key criteria were the gentle morning sun of an east-facing slope, and a good view to retire to. Andrew, a toddler when the search began, reckons some five years of weekends were lost to the search. “I could equally be standing on the Mornington Peninsula, extolling the virtues of that, or Macedon or Geelong or anywhere,” he tells me. “So, it was just pure and simple luck that dad found this place.”
It was 1983, and there were no vines anywhere near this Upper Yarra section, which remains remote and sparsely planted. But there was a real estate sign on the wall of a property with little to show for itself beyond a few cows, a tree and a heap of blackberries. They arranged a viewing. “We entered through the top gate and it opens up before you and dad said, ‘Yeah, this is the place’ pretty much straight away,” Andrew says. “It’s a pretty nice little world up here.”
None of the stringent site analysis de rigueur these days took place; you pretty much went on the vibe. As it turns out, it’s significantly cooler and rainier than the Lower Yarra, with fairly deep red volcanic loam and a few clay pans here and there. It’s fertile and vigorous—“two things we tend to fight against a little bit”, with leaf-plucking, shoot-thinning and other measures commonly called upon to keep the vegetative growth under control and the yields in balance.
Even so, the Marks family had chanced upon something precious in Gembrook. Timo Mayer, the estate’s winemaker from 2000 to 2017, comes from four centuries of winegrowing stock in Germany’s Württemberg region. He has no doubt that this place has something truly special. “The vineyard is unique—like, you don't get that fruit anywhere else. It's east-facing, the southernmost vineyard in the Yarra Valley,” he says. “You know, so it's cool, and it's protected. That makes it a unique terroir. It’s citrusy, grapefruity; you can taste it in a lineup.” Heathcote vigneron Simon Osicka, a close old friend of Andrew’s, clarifies Mayer’s European notion of terroir as “very distinctly and deservedly different”.
The punt on the dirt was a good one, then. The next question was what to put in it.
Laying down roots
“Reg just said, ‘Look, I don’t know what would grow up here; it’s so bloody cold and desolate. Try Sauvignon Blanc—that’s a cool-climate variety.’” That’s Andrew’s summary of Reg Egan’s rigorous viticultural research on the place. But the Sancerre grape was duly selected. Two years later, Cape Mentelle founder David Hohnen and winemaker Kevin Judd established Cloudy Bay in Marlborough, New Zealand, kicking off a craze that would make Egan’s off-hand suggestion look like a stroke of genius.
Chardonnay and Pinot Noir plantings followed soon after, but the Marks family sold the fruit for the first few years, primarily to Garry Crittenden, the founder of Dromana Estate. But Ian Marks was making the most of his haven. “He’d work quite long hours as a dentist, and every single weekend, he’d spend 12-hour days up here,” Andrew recalls. The vines, the garden, the trees, the border—all of it planted by Ian and June. “He bugged me from a pretty young age to give him a hand. He used to prune, make the cuts, and I’d be pulling out for him,” says Andrew. “He’d had a big barrow made so he could burn all the prunings as he went along like the French used to do to prevent disease, but it’s pretty labour-intensive. I mean, a crazy way of doing things.”
Meanwhile, the first Gembrook wines were about to enter the world. The 1989 harvest was the first to be vinified, with the garage of the Marks family’s Hawthorn home playing a cameo as the cellar. Then, in the 1990s, they moved into a more professional phase, calling on the services of “switched-on” David Lance of 1976-founded Diamond Valley Vineyards.
The friendship with the Middletons, Egans and McMahons continued—Andrew Marks recalls grape-picking and open days at Mount Mary and camping holidays with Reg and Tina Egan—and the cohort was a regular fixture on Melbourne’s dining circuit. The friendships forged in those times count for pretty much the sum total of Gembrook’s marketing efforts, with these wines a mainstay among on-premise beacons ever since. Plugged-in sommelier Curtis Marsh was the Marks’s Victorian distributor, and the likes of Luke Mangan, Guy Grossi and Teage Ezard were exposed to the wines through their apprenticeship at Two Faces, the South Yarra restaurant of good friend Hermann Schneider. Young Andrew would deliver wines to Stephanie Alexander’s restaurant around the corner in Hawthorn. “They’d go up to Sydney from time to time, and mum tells the story of visiting The Rocks, where Neil Perry came out to taste the wines. He's never taken them off the list since.” Being liked and listed in those restaurants was to be wanted everywhere, such was their prestige.
The Gembrook Hill community was building closer to home, too, albeit with the friends-and-family picking crew’s tenure cut short. “As soon as you’ve had lunch, that’s it. No more fruit gets picked; it’s a write-off,” says Andrew. “We’ve got all these photos of people on their backsides in the grass—pretty funny.” Gembrook CFA proved a more sober source of labour, harvesting the grapes in return for a donation as an annual fundraiser.
Meanwhile, the curtain was about to fall on the contract-winemaking phase. The quality and reputation of the wines had risen steadily with David Lance at the helm. However, trucking the freshly picked grapes to Diamond Valley—a 70km trek across the valley on roads still not fully paved—was unsustainable.
In 2000, Ian and June built the winery, Timo Mayer joined as winemaker, and Gembrook Hill’s transition from project to paragon began.
The Wanderer
Conviction and faithfulness are part of the pull of the Gembrook story; that in an easy-come, easy-go world where identities and allegiances are adopted and dropped like catwalk poses, some values remain constant. But fluidity of thought is also written into the DNA of this six-hectare domaine.
Andrew Marks cut his teeth as a winemaker at Penfolds, a producer whose reputation occupies the same plane as Gembrook Hill but at the opposite end of the spectrum in almost every regard: resources, reach, glamour, fame. It might seem an uneasy match—“We were essentially wine managers,” says Andrew of the calculated precision of Penfolds—but a creative mind takes infinite invaluable lessons from such an experience.
By the time Andrew’s five-year stint at Penfolds ended in 2003, Mayer and Marks Sr had hit a groove in Gembrook. There was no immediate succession in the offing. With Simon Osicka, Margaret River winemaker Rob Mann is the third member of a tight trio of deep-thinking friends. Mann is well placed to comment on winemaking lineage as the grandson of WA legend Jack Mann, and recalls conversations from the time. “The important thing was the vineyard integrity, and his dad wasn’t going risk that on the basis that his son had come home,” Mann says. “Andrew may not have understood that completely, and it’s taken a long time to work out that was a real positive for the development and evolution of Gembrook.”
Andrew did the opposite of sit and wait. In time, he and Mayer would form a formidable double act, a pair of fully committed, compatible part-timers at Gembrook Hill. But in 2005, Andrew released the first wines under his outstanding The Wanderer label. He worked harvests with Puligny grower Étienne Sauzet and Saint-Aubin négociant Roux Père et Fils and fell in love with Empordà on Cataluña’s Costa Brava in 2004. He worked with the Espelt family pretty much every northern summer for 10 consecutive years, even crafting his own El Wanderer Carinyena (Carignan) from their old bush vines.
If all this sounds far removed from Collins Street dentistry, it is, and it isn’t. “Dad was a very creative person. He was a great photographer, a great painter; he had a great aesthetic,” says Andrew. “He said to me and my sisters, ‘Being creative is the most important thing you can be.’ And I’ve always taken that and run with it.” And then, there’s his mother, June, whose sense of adventure remains undimmed. “She’s classic. She’s classy. She’s still very curious—curiosity is obviously a sign of intelligence to mine. And she's great fun.”
Those family traits—and the situation at home—played a key role in Andrew’s meandering, yet far from aimless, direction. “He’s always been quite intuitive, and he’s always had this knack of seeing the one bright star in the night sky before anyone else could see it,” says Mann. “The Wanderer is an appropriate name because he was essentially wandering the world, trying to find his place in it and trying to understand his place in his family business. In a way, Gembrook was something really precious that he didn’t want to break. But he could take risks and be adventurous because Gembrook was the rock, and everything else was the stuff he could play with and learn from.”
The first post-Penfolds decade bore witness to an explosion of pace-setting creativity. Among Andrew’s early releases were a Moscato, pair of field-blend whites, Provence-style rosé and later barrel-fermented Chenin Blanc and varietal Cabernet Franc—not to mention the spicy Spanish red. All of these anticipated waves of fashion that would roll in on these shores in years to come. Inspired by the thrill of eating fried octopus washed down with vi turbio—a cloudy local white with cutting acidity and 10% alcohol—amid an electrical storm in Spain, he also wanted to bottle a Gewürztaminer/Chardonnay on lees, long before the style became trendy. “If I'd done that in Australia, I wouldn't have sold a single bottle, so I chickened out towards the end,” he says.
There were no cold feet, though, on the gin front. Andrew established Melbourne Gin Company (MGC) in 2012, a year ahead of Four Pillars and before the craft spirits craze caught fire. If MGC sounds like a big thing, that’s because this one-man band felt he needed to “project big” to get it noticed. It now employs a distiller and a couple of other staff—and necessitates a bottling line that is a boon for Gembrook Hill, which never could have justified it alone. But MGC was a solo “journey to alchemy”. There were no how-to YouTube videos, just a bloke and his curiosity. “I was doing it blind by myself, in a cone of silence; I wasn’t telling anyone—just a few good friends knew about it.”
It was a project “absolutely born of wine” with an unconventional approach to devising and producing a consistent product. “I distilled everything individually and blended it all together. It meant that I could be very precise in the way I built the flavour profile, which was very much informed by winemaking and mainly from aroma, because my palate gets fatigued very quickly tasting gin. By the time I nailed the flavour profile, I saw it was like painting a picture; you have to know when to stop.” In typically Marksist fashion, he worked incredibly hard to get there, designed the label and packaging, and stuck with it. A single entity, perfectly formed. What else do you need?
One of the friends who knew about the project and participated in blind sampling was Rob Mann. “I was talking to him about it the other day,” says Mann. “It wasn't because he wanted to make gin; it was because he wanted to replicate the romance and excitement and anticipation of a great Martini—that occasion of having an ice-cold Martini done perfectly in a beautiful part of the world, at a great bar, or with the right people. And just, ‘Oh, I might as well make my own gin to do that.’ I think he comes at these things from a different angle, and he's been quite innovative and remarkable at the same time.”
The pursuit of Gembrook
Timo Mayer spent the first couple of years tweaking the viticulture, which essentially meant bringing yields into balance for ripeness and intensity to let the vineyard fully show itself. And, as far as he was concerned, it was the end of winemaking. “It’s a stupid term anyway,” he says. “We make good fruit, then do as little as possible. It’s been the same philosophy ever since. If you've got good fruit, everything is sorted.” Henceforth, spontaneous yeasts, no prodding, no adding, no taking away. “If something does fuck up, we intervene. But other than that, just let it do its own thing. And that's the style in good estates all over Europe. And that's what you do, obviously, now and probably forever.”
Andrew articulates the approach in almost identical terms. To my palate, his timing is impeccable when it comes to picking with fully realised flavour and structural balance. There are no press cuts, and no fining or filtration; everything is kept complete. He loves texture in his wines, describing the ideal shape as a teardrop—not fat but not skinny on the midpalate, with a very long, tapering finish. “I trust the vineyard a lot—it’s more resilient than we think. We give ourselves time to grow the wine. We’re not forcing things. Dad was very humble in that sense; he was all about the vineyard. Having the vineyard forward is always what we’ve tried to do.” Acknowledging that his hardly qualifies as an unbiased opinion, Simon Osicka feels that intent plays out in the finished article here. “It's driven more out of the personality of the site rather than the endeavour of greatness,” he tells me. “I guess you see plenty of great projects where people throw lots and lots of money and start in pursuit of perfection, whereas I think Gembrook is about the pursuit of Gembrook.”
Somehow, the fellow feeling among the Marks’s friendship circle has also been brought to bear—the warmth of Reg Egan’s raconteurship, the patience of a bygone era, the dignity of holding firm. Rob Mann captures it in his memories of Marks family dinners. “It was my first real experience with old Mount Mary wines, particularly the Cabernet blend. I remember having these, like, 1984, 1986 Mount Mary Cabernets and thinking how beautiful and ethereal they were,” Mann says. “They were quite light but they had amazing interest and complexity and also history in the bottle. Everyone at the table had a lot of respect for that. The Gembrook wines had that same feeling to me because they weren't fashionable wines, but they had this beautiful integrity and clarity and sense of purpose without being big or heavy or forceful. I think that's something that evolved from Ian Marks’s passion, but also that's what that site gave.”
Andrew counts himself lucky that so much of the hard work was done before he came along. “My old man was very decisive. He made decisions and stuck with them, lived with them—off he went. That’s easier said than done.” Then he pauses. “Having said that, I have changed things quite a lot; you forget that as well.” He’s added to the range with the IJM Pinot Noir, bearing his father’s initials and first produced in the year of his sudden death in 2017, and then with the JKM to honour his mother. He’s replaced old trunks infected with eutypa or suffering decay. He’s expanded plantings with some new mass-selection Pinot cuttings, too. And then there’s the “Copernican revolution” (“We realised the sun wasn’t travelling around us”) that took place when he and his vineyard assistant Shaun Thornton discovered pruning for sap flow. “It was devastating to realise we could have been pruning better all these years—and exhilarating, too, to realise we can still learn new things. So, the follow-up question was: What else don’t we know?”
Marks, Mann and Osicka meet up at least once a year—with a bonus this year on the occasion of Andrew’s 50th birthday, coincidentally the same weekend I contacted the latter two for comment on this story. “They’re both very talented, very smart guys,” Andrew says of his friends. “We all know the future is in the vineyard, and we’re all trying to make single-vineyard wines that have got character, authenticity and purity.” These days, the reunions have a distinctly educational bent. The most recent one took place in the Yarra Valley, interrogating the likes of Sarah Crowe at Yarra Yering, Tom and Nadège Carson at Serrat and Oakridge viticulture sage Steve Faulkner.
Mann and Osicka’s take on these field trips exemplifies the cutting-edge thinking among Australia’s best domaines and points to a bright future for Corymbia, Paul Osicka, Gembrook Hill and their ilk. “Essentially, we all farm our own properties, and that’s where we get the biggest influence on the quality and style of our wine,” says Mann, who runs Corymbia with his wife, Genevieve. “So, we're doing almost exactly the same thing in different parts of Australia, trying to eke out something that’s sort of timeless and multi-generational and something that will outlive us all.”
All three are reluctant to accept credit—they emphasise the process while we tend to dwell on the result—but it’s clear that both generational effort and personal connection are integral to the output. “We’re all kind of out there, in the winter cold, wet boots or whatever, pruning our vines and doing all that,” Osicka tells me. “Our aspiration—trying to make the best wine we can—is very much based on being out in the field and doing it ourselves. And I kind of see that, in a way, you’re creating your own success, but you’re reflecting your own failures as well. It’d be much easier if you had a whole team of people working out there. Would it make for a better wine? Probably—I don’t know. But there's a sense of intimacy to it in terms of your own take on what you do. And someone could ask me any minute detail of my wine, and I can absolutely answer it because I’ve done it.”
Nobody told them
Andrew Marks won’t pretend every moment in the vines is bliss—certainly not back in his teens, doing the drudge work at weekends and school holidays. “It sometimes used to bore the hell out of me,” he admits. “But generally speaking, it’s a lot of fun making wine. It takes you a while to realise the beauty because it seems like you’re doing a lot of menial tasks, but actually, every year, the season’s different, and everything is always growing. The most important cut you make in pruning is the position of the spur. That's not for this year; it’s for next year, so you’re always paying it forward. And as you go through that growing season, you're looking at that spur and seeing how it’s growing, and then the following year, you're laying it down as a cane and seeing how that went. From the outside, it looks like a very mundane job, but there’s a lot of beauty in it. You've just got to switch your thinking a little bit to accept that. And it's actually quite zen.”
He would love, of course, to be growing the wine alongside Ian. As it is, though, June continues to embody Gembrook’s quality, aesthetic and devotion to the land. “It’s awesome. I’m very lucky,” Andrew says of working with his mother. “June brings standards. I’m in a constant rush, and she makes the place look amazing and is a great support.” One time Andrew doesn’t rush is when it comes to blending the wines. He’ll take them home, look at them over several days, drink them with food—trusting the fruit, trusting the vineyard—until he’s happy. June does the same and has to be happy, too.
Timo Mayer kicked off his eponymous label in 1999, the year before he joined Ian Marks. By 2012 or so, it was doing so well that he no longer needed the Gembrook gig. But he stayed on until 2017. “They are the best people. That's why I worked there for so long. I wasn't just in there for the lunches,” he jokes. “It was Ian and June.”
Many still feel that same affection, which is central to Gembrook Hill’s prestige in certain circles. But Andrew has a nagging doubt that he’s not doing enough to keep the name on people’s lips—a fear compounded by the way the concept of a “traditional” estate is sometimes conflated with the notion of conventional winemaking. It’s a powerful misconception; Gembrook is the epitome of sensitive, hands-on farming and negligible winemaking. “I think sometimes we almost spend too much time with the vineyard, and we should be spending more time out selling our wine. Not even selling, just marketing, as the face of Gembrook, because a lot of people have never heard of us,” says Andrew. “The market turns over so quickly, like, all my dad’s patients are not probably drinking wine any more, or are probably ageing out of wine-drinking. And so that needs to rejuvenate. We’re well-represented, but you still need to go out there and find your tribe a little bit and give people an opportunity to love your wines.”
There’s hardly any of them to go around, which makes you wonder whether best-kept secrets even need to be shared. Either way, a dentist’s dream has always done well by word of mouth. “There was no marketing department, say it that way. It’s just on a low simmer for its whole life,” says Timo Mayer. “If people know about it, they jump for it, you know. Down in the Yarra Valley, in Healesville, all the winemakers buy Gembrook. They go to the bottle shop or to Barrique—you always see a Gembrook Hill bottle on their table. They know that it's special. The whole world doesn't know yet because nobody told them.”
Ed, I really liked this article/ interview, thank you for sharing and looking forward to more. I already checked where I can get wine from this vinyard in Switzerland (not..., but in Germany I can)