Beside the serious wine, not instead of it.

Then there are the other wines.

The list, more or less in the order it got out of hand: pét-nat. Gamay. Syrah. Sparkling. Schönburger from Chartley Estate in the Tamar. Botrytis Riesling from Pressing Matters in the Coal River. Gins. A 50:50 Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. Something called Wild Project #1. A Brandy Cask Syrah. And the clone wines: MV6, Abel and 114.

It's quite a list for a winery this size.

And yes, there's an obvious danger here. Small producers making fifteen different things can sometimes look like small producers who haven't quite worked out what they want to be when they grow up.

That's not really what was happening.

These wines always sat beside the core wines, not instead of them. Nobody stopped caring about Pinot Noir or Chardonnay so we could run off and make something orange in a bucket. The serious wines still had to be serious. They had to be clean, precise, delicious and right.

The strange stuff happened alongside them.

And, frankly, that was half the fun.

Some of the projects came about simply because something interesting appeared and we wanted to know what it would do.

Schönburger is a good example. Most Australian wine drinkers have never heard of it. There isn't much of it in Tasmania either. So there was no clever marketing strategy behind making one. No trend to jump on. No established Schönburger market waiting patiently for us.

Someone grows it at Chartley Estate in the Tamar.

We thought: what happens if we make wine from that?

Good enough reason.

The Botrytis Riesling from Pressing Matters was a different kind of opportunity. Botrytis is wonderfully inconvenient. When the conditions are right, the fungus shrivels the berries, concentrates the fruit and creates something extraordinary. When the conditions aren't right, you don't get one.

You can't really put it in the five-year production plan.

The season either gives it to you or it doesn't.

When it does, you say yes.

The clone wines were probably the nerdiest experiments of the lot.

MV6, Abel and 114 are different clones — different selections of the same grape variety. Normally they disappear into the blend together. We bottled them separately so you could actually taste what each one brought to the party.

Same vineyard. Same winemaking. Different clone.

Taste them next to each other and suddenly a fairly dry viticultural conversation becomes very real.

That experiment wasn't flashy at all. In some ways it was the opposite of a novelty wine.

But the instinct behind it was exactly the same:

Don't just talk about it. Make it separately and find out.

Then there were the gins.

And the Brandy Cask Syrah.

Those require considerably less intellectual justification.

They sounded like fun.

So we made them.

That's probably the thread running through all of this. Not a particular style of wine, and definitely not a desire to make weird things for the sake of being weird.

It's curiosity.

The belief that being serious about wine and having fun with wine are not opposing ideas.

A carefully made single-vineyard Chardonnay and a pét-nat can come from exactly the same place: wanting to understand what happens if you do something, and caring enough to find out properly.

Some experiments were brilliant.

Some were interesting.

Some probably only needed to happen once.

That's fine too.

An experiment with a guaranteed outcome isn't much of an experiment.

Most of these wines are long gone now. A few were made in quantities so small that a larger winery probably wouldn't have bothered turning the equipment on. Some will never be made again.

But they belong in the story because, taken together, they say something about Small Island that a neat little portfolio of permanent wines never could.

We like making very good wine.

We also like asking what if?

And every now and then, the only sensible thing to do is make the wine and find out.

The wine is taken seriously. Very little else is.