Our besuited driver is not best pleased. Spinning a curveball into his official itinerary, he now dodges kangaroos and tight corners, winding through the forested gullies of the Basket Range in the Adelaide Hills. We finally lurch up a steep driveway, initially overshooting its discreet entrance.
“Well, that’s quirky,” he announces. Free-range children and their entourage of myriad cats, dogs, alpacas, and ducks scurry among gnarly vines, oak barrels, ancient chestnut trees, and tubs seemingly abandoned in the 10-acre plot but turn out to be strategically placed for twilight bathing. A few surfboards etched with “So yet, we flow together, and it kept us all together” lean against the wooden house. A couple of baby pygmy goats jump on its roof.
There were never going to be bougie tasting rooms or spittoons here at Ochota Barrels, the off-circuit home of one of Australia’s most rock ’n’ roll lo-fi winemakers. Owner Amber Ochota—barefoot, head bandana, patched jeans—lopes into view to welcome Andrea Carlson, the chef and owner of Vancouver’s Michelin-starred Burdock & Co. (I’m chronicling her unearthing the country’s slow-food-and-wine personality for an Australia-inspired menu.) Lingering hugs establish us more as fast friends than meeting for the first time.
Amber Ochota (left) and Andrea Carlson. Photo by Pablo Diaz.
We’re at this strictly invite-only detour during our two-week trip in October (Australia’s spring) thanks to Ochota’s longtime friend, Duncan Welgemoed. The Adelaide-based chef bounds over, excited that our route is now “Duncan-ed” (larger-than-life, he’s also a verb in South Australia). “Amber is one of the most fierce and original voices in Australian wine—you must meet her,” he insisted earlier in the week during a scheduled tourism-board visit to his Africola restaurant.
A glass of Texture Like Sun (a blend of pinot noir and other wines, its vintage continually evolves) slips into our hands. Named for The Stranglers’ “Golden Brown” lyrics, the bottles riff on the misspent youths of Ochota and her late husband, Taras, in a mix of their punk, surfing, and wine-making travels worldwide including California, France, and Mexico.
He swapped playing bass in bands (Mick Jagger popped in for a tasting and ended up on the piano some years back) for oenology studies in the couple’s native Adelaide. Then they worked in a winery in Sweden before returning home to have a family and set up Ochota Barrels in 2008. When Taras died five years ago at 49, due to complications of an autoimmune condition, The New York Times called him “a wild man and a gentle soul.”
At the back of the house under the laugh of a kookaburra, today their lush garden bursts with organic vegetables and plants. “No nasties,” Ochota says, in any part of their land. Carlson soon immerses herself in lemon verbena, wormwood, wild fennel, Meyer lemons, elderflowers, spearmint, bay leaf, lavender, roses, sage, lemon balm…
“I always notice the aroma first,” she says, bending down to scoop them in her free hand. “It’s just how I’m wired, and it’s how I am with food, too—it’s probably super annoying.”
Not so for Ochota, who agrees the tactile, three-dimensional approach is essential for her own creations, “and I love to infuse my love of the garden in winemaking too.” It’s here where her young children, Sage and Anouk, recently went wild, fashioning a giant teabag of these types of organic leaves, herbs, citrus, flowers, and fruit. She then added it into the barrel of the off-script, vermouth-inspired Botanicals of the Basket Range, a continuous ferment of pinot meunier, grenache, gewürztraminer, pinot noir, syrah, and gamay from their own and other vines nearby. The bottle’s green label is handmade, and the word “meow” is featured on the cork.
Photo by Amber Ochota.
With each batch numbered (often as small as 505) and on the list at places such as Claridge’s hotel and Spring restaurant in London, competition can be stiff for the cult wine. Burdock may be just a “tiny slice” on Main Street, but it’s been at the vanguard of minimal intervention wines including Ochota since opening in 2013.
“Their wines have this rare mix of energy and finesse,” Burdock’s wine director Maisie Ryan later says of the winery. (The restaurant pairs courses with its Botanicals and A Forest Pinot Noir.) There’s “care and craft woven into every bottle… and letting the fruit speak without any fuss really mirrors how we try to do things here,” she adds. “It’s always a little fun.”
It’s a winemaking genre—not without its critics for the occasional cloudiness—that focuses on a natural acidity and an artisanal approach. “People get revved up about what is natural—but as Taras was always saying, we just want to make beautiful wines,” Ochota states, adding “holistic” is her preferred descriptor.
She ushers us up another steep bank to join a long table of 15 or so of her female neighbours. They’ve just downed gardening tools after a monthly meetup to tame each other’s yards and help, no doubt, with grief. Now it’s time for Welgemoed’s feast of merguez sausage wheels, fermented potato flatbreads, and just-picked Ochota garden salad of fennel, borage, and shaved courgette.
A pinot noir called Home… arrives from limited-edition barrels in the winery’s shed with giant pink-chalk hearts drawn on their tops. Its grapes are picked by family and friends from a micro-vineyard (it takes less than two hours) in nearby Uraidla and followed by a picnic “under the persimmon trees, then we foot stomp the fruit, letting it ferment for a week or two and add nothing to it,” she explains.
It’s that love you’ll taste in their wines, Welgemoed opines. “I am lucky enough to cook there often, and I always leave feeling slightly transformed. I also usually wake up with a tremendous hangover, but that is simply part of the magic.”
Just as the food scene here and in neighbouring Victoria embraces Carlson throughout her tour, she again feels “folded in” with Ochota and the fellow gardeners.
“What I find so remarkable here is that it feels like we’ve landed on a Gulf Island—close-knit communities, supportive, giving, more artistic, more hands on, more capable,” adds Carlson, who knows island life intimately after running Sunflour Bakery on Savary in the late ’90s with her life and business partner, the architect Kevin Bismanis. “It makes me feel comfortable, and that energy echoes who I am.”
Amber Ochota inspects wine barrels. Photo by Pablo Diaz.
Her laser focus on seasons and sustainability—an encyclopedic knowledge of which anchors Burdock—seems to speak louder than any ego she has as the first female to helm a Michelin restaurant in Canada. The questions spool out gently: “Why plant gamay up on that slope?” “What thrives here?” “Which plants are Indigenous?” “How does that taste?”
“You can tell passionate gardeners and those interested in the soil,” Ochota tells the chef who lists Master Gardener and pioneering the 100-mile menu at the now-defunct Raincity Grill on her resumé. “You’re like a cat who sits there quite quietly but is really curious and absolutely all over everything.”
Later, while under the Southern Cross and with some Ochota Barrels still in our veins, Carlson’s “Australia Under a Cold Moon” menu starts to wax: a playground of botanicals such as baby blue eucalyptus, Australian bush mint, and cinnamon myrtle among local heroes including Sunseeker oyster, huckleberry glaze, and Salt Spring Island finger lime. She’s even reimagining an in-house version of Vegemite, the nation’s spread, in the artistry and alchemy of her road-trip tasting menu.
“It’s the warmth of the people and connection between growers, chefs and winemakers that’s so integral to understanding it all.”
“Australia Under a Cold Moon” runs at Burdock & Co, 2702 Main Street, Vancouver, until February 9.
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