One small producer reading Tasmania as several different places.

Tasmania gets talked about as one wine region.

Which is tidy.

It’s also not particularly true.

Drive from the Tamar Valley down to the Channel and you’ve covered a fair chunk of an island, several weather systems and, depending on the roadworks, most of your day.

The vineyards don’t behave the same either.

So in 2016 and 2017, we built the Small Island range around that idea.

Not Reserve, Premium and Extremely Premium.

Just:

North. East. South.

Single Site North came from Glengarry in the Tamar Valley — the vineyard where Small Island started.

Single Site East came from Gala Estate on the East Coast.

Single Site South came from southern Tasmania: Tinderbox on the Channel and fruit from the Coal River Valley.

We’re deliberately not naming the Coal River grower here. The old paperwork and coordinates give us a very good idea who it was, but nobody actually wrote it down.

Seven years later, pretty sure is still not the same as sure.

So: Coal River it is.

The fun part was putting the wines next to each other.

Same variety.

Same vintage.

Same winemaker.

Different bits of Tasmania.

You didn’t need us to give you a lecture about terroir.

Drink North.

Drink East.

Drink South.

See what you think.

Then we made the whole argument slightly more complicated.

Alongside the single sites sat Black Label.

In both 2016 and 2017 it was a straight 50/50 blend of Glengarry and Gala Estate.

North and East, back together in the same bottle.

Which meant the range was making two apparently contradictory points at once.

Place matters.

And:

Sometimes blending places makes a better wine.

Both are true.

Wine gets a bit silly when you decide one of those has to become a religion.

There was another important part to the model.

We didn’t own any of these vineyards.

We still don’t.

For some wineries that seems to require a lengthy explanation involving words like custodian, partnership and journey.

Ours is simpler.

Other people grow really good grapes.

We buy them.

More importantly, we keep working with growers who know their own vineyards far better than we ever will.

That gave a very small winery the chance to work across the Tamar, East Coast, Coal River and Channel in the same year.

Owning one vineyard would have given us one place to understand deeply.

Working this way gave us several.

There are downsides.

You can’t simply order a vineyard around.

Picking dates are conversations.

In difficult years, several winemakers can suddenly discover they all desperately need the same grapes picked at 7am tomorrow.

That keeps everyone friendly.

Mostly.

But the trade-off is worth it.

One small producer.

Several parts of Tasmania.

Same vintage.

Same winery.

And a chance to see what changed when the place changed.

The vineyards have shifted over the years. The Tasman Peninsula now does much more of the talking, particularly Saltwater River.

But the original idea never really disappeared.

Don’t decide what Tasmania tastes like.

Go around the island and find out.