Tim Shand: Taking a punt

This article was first published in Halliday Wine Companion Magazine in 2016. Tim Shand was the winemaker at Punt Road in the Yarra Valley at the time. Shand has since become head winemaker at Voyager Estate.

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WHEN WINEMAKER TIM Shand was 30 years old he spent a vintage working at the McWilliam’s winery at Griffith. There are a lot of fancy things a winemaker can hope to do but at Griffith the task was entirely proletarian.

On his first day he walked into an ‘oak trial’ where he had to taste his way through over a hundred sample wines and make decisions on each. It set the tone. He spent the following months tasting and tasting and blending and blending, and if he got it wrong on large-scale wines the sales would plummet. It was a job of considerable responsibility; it would either break or make him. The result was that it supercharged his ability to bottle wines in a condition and style that he was certain everyday wine drinkers would like.

"There are no excuses,” he says of the task. “The customer is always right. If they don’t like what you serve up, they’ll stop buying it. It (McWilliam’s) was a fantastic experience. And you can’t go the other way: you can’t start at a boutique on the Mornington Peninsula and then go and get that experience. I tell all young winemakers: get to the Riverina, and work at the biggest winery you can.”

If you’re looking for the perfect top-and-tail experience this might just be it: Shand walked from McWilliam’s into a job at Giant Steps in the Yarra Valley. Suddenly it wasn’t so much about scaling the heap; it was about soaring above it. Quality, extreme quality, was the mantra.

“(At Giant Steps) there was a focus on single vineyard wines but you really cut your teeth whacking out pinot noir that had to hit the shelf at $24 and have complexity and interest without hitting the inside of a barrel. It was the dream job to walk into a place like that – from every angle.”

Shand spent three years on the good ship Giant Steps before being poached by fellow Yarra Valley winery Punt Road. It’s been game on ever since.

Punt Road, it’s not unkind to say, was in desperate need of him at the time. It had launched with a splash in the early 2000s and while the quality of its wines had always been there or thereabouts, by late 2013 its business model had accumulated more than its fair share of flesh wounds. When Shand arrived the place wasn’t rudderless but it didn’t really know where it was going either. Stock levels had started to accumulate to dangerous levels. The wines as a result didn’t always look as fresh or as vibrant as drinkers might have liked. Surgery was required. 

Shand, now 37, had his winemaking scalpel sharpened and ready. "I walked in raring to go, to take my own crack at things. And it was all here, that’s the thing. It’s one of the oldest sites in the valley, it’s a thirty year old vineyard with an interesting mix of varieties, and I had the freedom to do what I want. Even better, we had a distributor who was screaming for us to make more interesting wines.”

He’s made it look easy – the Punt Road wines, in both quality and sales, are now flying – but it only looks so in hindsight. “It was terrifying walking into here. There was no crutch. People were so pejorative towards the label, there was no free kick, if we were going to get anywhere then people had to actually taste the wines and like them; there was nothing else to get them over the line.

“The first thing we had to do was decide who we are, and where we want to be. It’s a workhorse vineyard. We’re not Applejack or Lusatia Park. It’s our challenge to make good, flavorsome, interesting wine. We’ll be $22 to $29 most of the time and we’ll be really good drinking at that. Basically we want to be the people’s champion of the Yarra Valley.

What did he most need to work on? “There was a disengagement between the vineyard and the winery. We’ve never really been single vineyard. We are now. We’ve done a lot of work in that regard. They’re (Punt Road’s owners) fruit growers. They believe in sound, clean fruit and it’s up to me to make something of it.”

And that indeed he has. The turn in Punt Road’s fortunes since Shand’s arrival has been dramatic. One of the things he’s done is throw out the concept of “price”, or more particularly its importance in winemaking decisions. The focus couldn’t be more simple: what do people want to drink?

“Instead of taking all our grapes and making them the same, how about we try to make some interesting things? So we completely nullified the idea of premium and budget.

“I hate afterthought winemaking and wine brands. I hate ‘second labels’ that are just what’s left over. I like to do everything optimally. When the grapes are right, we get them in. It doesn’t really matter if it’s $10 or $50 a bottle – if there’s no reason to filter, fine, add too much sulphur or whatever, then there’s no reason to do it regardless of price.

“A lot of winemaking tries to tick too many boxes. I like to tick five boxes, that’s it, don’t overcomplicate it. The Dan’s (Murphy’s) customers have a few boxes in their mind. We tick them, and we’re done.”

One of the main things Shand believes is that wine drinkers want their wine delivered with its freshness wholly intact.

“Getting the release times of your wines right is so crucial. It means many things but you need to get your volumes right, you need to be super organised.”

A perfect example is the estate’s pinot gris – released just a few months from vintage. “We’re not trying to make it like chardonnay; the brief is that ‘I don’t want to see this in 12 months. I want it all gone. I want it lovely and fresh.’ We’re already selling 2016 gris (in early July 2016); it’s fantastic; we’re not shortchanging anyone. The wine’s good. We’re happy, customers are happy.

“Chardonnay, pinot gris and pinot noir – (suddenly) we can’t keep up with demand. They’re going gangbusters. I reckon Yarra pinot noir or cool climate pinot noir in general is entering the realm of Barossa shiraz and Marlborough sauvignon blanc. And if you want to buy it in the $20s, then the Yarra can do it better than most regions. I honestly think pinot noir (as a category) has just entered the commercial realm.”

Which brings us to other secret of Shand’s success: flavour. It’s the one thing in wine that will never be out of favour, regardless of what anyone says, or tries to peddle. It means he’s always asking the question: what can we do to create flavour, without using oak?

“Why do we all have to sing the song that ‘we don’t have to do anything, it’s all in the vineyard’? Why can’t we create flavours (in the winery) that people like? We find skins and bunches help us with that. People like overt flavours, particularly people who are buying $8 a glass in a bistro.

“We’re trying to take people’s minds away from variety and give them a style. I look at Europe and how easy wine is in that culture. I’d love to get to the point where we don’t have to talk about wine all the time; where it’s just about hitting a style, and that’s the start and end of it.”

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