Fagan ritual: Far beyond the bread and butter
Chances are you’ve drunk Sarah Fagan’s wines. Chances are you’ve been impressed. Chances are you’ve never heard of her. Chances are she wouldn’t care. After all, if you liked what you tasted and felt it was money well spent, why waste time thinking about who made it? That would be inefficient—and Sarah Fagan can’t abide inefficiency.
If it’s taken a while for Fagan to come to your attention, she was quick as a flash in gaining trust and respect from those in the know. Beginning with a three-month stint in her final year of university, she kicked off a 20-year stretch at De Bortoli in the Yarra Valley. During that time, De Bortoli won endless accolades across all price points while never falling out of the top 10 of Australia’s largest wine companies. Countless alumni have made a name for themselves that resonates across Australia—Dave Bicknell, Timo Mayer, Bill Downie, Luke Lambert. In 2023, she finally left to join TarraWarra, a 40-year-old, 26-hectare estate in Yarra Glen. And now you’re going to notice her, whether she likes it or not.
Cowra Connection
Fagan grew up on a 4,000-acre farm in Cowra, NSW. She loved the farm, mucking in with her two older brothers and hanging out with their mates. They raised sheep and grew everything—oats, wheat, sweetcorn, tomatoes, you name it. They put vines in, too, in the early- to mid-90s and became grape-growers for Jacob’s Creek parent Orlando. Still, wine wasn’t on Fagan’s mind when she embarked on a short-lived foray into Agricultural Science at Sydney University. “It became apparent quite quickly that wheat is pretty much wheat, oats are pretty much oats, canola… it’s all about yield and protein,” she says, with a plain matter-of-factness in keeping with her bent for concision. “It’s all the same, give or take.”
Already, wine seemed to offer something extra. The Fagan family vine sideline put them in the orbit of the Cowra wine scene, including ex-Hunter Valley viticulturist Greg Johnson, who’d drop ’round with interesting bottles. She recalls an epiphany in the kitchen, a French Chardonnay— “probably bog-standard” but arrestingly different from the usual local fare. Compared to the same-sameness of cereals, this—“how one grape variety can be a vehicle for so much change”—was something that could keep her attention.
Fagan switched to Wine Science at Wagga Wagga aged 20 and found herself on “a pretty cool little learning curve”. Her cohort was packed with talent, including the likes of Luke Lambert, Matt Holmes (Bannockburn), Annabel Holland (First Creek), Adam McCallum (Helen & Joey, ex-TarraWarra) and Charles Sturt Wine Science senior lecturer John Blackman.
But the key moment came in her final year when it was time to work a vintage. She was on a Victorian road trip, and her dad suggested she pay a visit to Steve Webber of De Bortoli, who’d been up to Cowra a few times to judge at the local show. She and her mates ended up staying in a cabin next door to Steve and his wife, Leanne de Bortoli. They got called over from their beers to have a glass of wine on the deck, and those late-night drinks turned into a vintage cellar hand gig for the 2003 harvest—and the start of a two-decade tenure.
The Big Time
Our relationship with larger companies tends to differ wildly from how we view boutique affairs. With the latter, we envisage scruffy, harried vignerons moonlighting at their own cellar door after a week in the field, harassed by paperwork and logistics and slightly broken things. With the former, we hardly imagine people at all—colossal tanks, conveyor belts, maybe. We forget that they are important employers and often hotbeds of innovation and prowess.
Fagan’s debut vintage led to another and then a full-time role. When she started at De Bortoli, Paul Bridgeman (Levantine Hill) was in charge of red winemaking, with Bill Downie taking the lead on Pinot Noir and Ben Cane (Duke’s Vineyard) heading up whites. Glenn Thompson (now consulting for Wine Network after a notable 17-year stint at Chandon), Ben Rankin of Wilimee and Bobar's Tom Belford are among those who passed through in those early years.
Webber and his right-hand man David Slingsby-Smith (“Slingers” as he’s affectionately remembered by all who came across him; he died in 2010) had a dynamic can-do culture in place. The estate, founded by Steve and Leanne in the early ‘90s as a satellite of De Bortoli’s Riverina motherland, had won the coveted 1997 Jimmy Watson Trophy for a Yarra Shiraz and was seen as a pacesetter across several styles and price points.
Curiosity ran through the business; Webber was a go-getter, says Fagan, and the team had the freedom and resources to follow it up. If someone discovered a head-turning wine, it might turn up the next day on a communal table for collective consumption and contemplation. When Steve and Leanne returned from a holiday, they’d invariably bring back with a wine to emulate. “Like a Syrah where there’s nothing more you could want in a Syrah—it’s delicious, it’s juicy, it’s fresh, it’s got spicy savouriness, but there’s plushness, right? Let’s aim for that!” says Fagan, evoking the spirit of those “super-fun” times. “There was a good vibe, and it was a good place for a young person to get into the industry. Everyone just worked hard, drank well, liked tasting wine. Talking about wine was always pretty important.”
Professional advancement could be fluid and fast-moving. “Steve’s always been good at giving young people a go,” she says. “He likes to bring people up from around, I guess, so I have to thank Steve a lot for where I am now.” Fagan was placed in charge of whites as early as 2005, then headed up reds from 2011 and saw out her time as the chief. During that time, she balanced a vast diversity of parcels—60 or so might be typical for Yarra Valley Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, with more variables than you might imagine from, say, the Dixons Creek home vineyard to Lusatia Park 40km away in the Upper Yarra. Multiply that by the possible treatments through vinification and maturation, and the experience quickly stacks up. Then you have all the regions—Heathcote, King Valley and Mornington Peninsula were all in her remit. And then the grape varieties: Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Gris, Syrah, Grenache and Cabernet Sauvignon on the mainstream side, and then Fiano, Greco, Gewürztraminer, Touriga Nacional, Tinta Cão, Sangiovese, Durif and more from the fringes. “It’s handy to see big companies,” she says. “De Bortoli exposed me to a lot of varieties, a lot of regions, a lot of circumstances.”
On top of all that, the depth of the De Bortoli range presents its own myriad permutations. As Fagan points out, the process at the “pointy end”—the top-level wines such as single-vineyard Chardonnay—is essentially the same for any company. The big difference comes at the lower price points, where you have large volumes of high-stakes wines and a sea of consumers depending on them. Leanne de Bortoli, who still remembers the “very green” but enthusiastic graduate that greeted her back in ’03, credits Fagan’s skill and cleverness in this regard. “With Windy Peak Pinot Noir (RRP $16), it's having that understanding that it's got to taste like Pinot and be delicious at a certain price point,” Leanne tells me. “It's the bread-and-butter wines that keep everybody in a job."
Fagan says it’s vital to respect the drinkers of those entry-point wines, which were always accorded equal importance during her tenure. “The consumer at that level is probably far more reactive than the consumer at a higher level who maybe understands the intricacies of vintage and region and things like that,” she says. “The bread-and-butter wines are a little more rough and ready through their very nature, so that’s where a little skill of the winemaker comes in, chiselling the edges.”
The Fagan Way
Steve Webber was not the only one to sense an outsize potential in Sarah Fagan early on. At quite the opposite end of the spectrum—and globe—from De Bortoli sits Littorai in Sebastopol, western Sonoma County. It was at Ted and Heidi Lemon’s estate, one of California’s leading lights of small-scale, terroir winegrowing, that Fagan worked the 2004 vintage. She clearly learned a heck of a lot about the relationship between vineyard and winery, the importance of balanced yields, the intersection of precision and instinct, and much else besides. She was also flattered, gobsmacked even, that the opinion of a 23-year-old Aussie should be accorded so much consideration. I got in touch with Ted Lemon to ask why. “It was very clear during her brief time at Littorai that Sarah possessed all the skills it takes to make great wine: a great palate, dedication, tenacity, thoughtfulness, caution,” he told me. “She was level-headed, had a great sense of perspective and a deep love of great wine—a love that goes well beyond hedonism to awe for a craft which has existed for millennia.”
Fagan’s friend and Yarra Valley peer Dylan McMahon of Burton McMahon echoes those sentiments. “Fages has always struck me as someone who’s very laidback and easygoing but not to be underestimated. She’s a country girl, down to earth, no bullshit. She's a very good winemaker, but you also see that pure hard work and dedication. You've got too many people relying on you to let that slip,” he adds, referring to her De Bortoli stewardship. “That's admirable, to carry that for so many years.”
Oats and wheat didn’t seduce her, but Fagan ties much of this back to her farm upbringing. “I was always being told to get on with the job; don’t mess around, don’t waste time. You get up at five, that’s when your job starts. So, I think I grew up with an inherently good work ethic, which kind of leads you to look around at logistics and think, ‘Right, how can we problem-solve this and make it all work?’.”
When we talk about making the best wine possible, that last word—possible—hides a host of pressures, parameters and hurdles. Those who consistently succeed tend to be adept at handling the moving parts and (a different skill) homing in on, nailing, the finer details. “Something about working for a big company is that when you’re busy, you’re really productive,” says Fagan. “That working-under-pressure thing forces you to think about things in a practical sense. What needs to get done? What’s the order? How do we make this efficient?” Imagining the spinning plates during harvest at De Bortoli is enough to make anyone feel dizzy, but Fagan earned a reputation for her calm amid the storm. “That kind of concept of vintage, where people would run around and yell, all chaos, is actually inefficient. People work better in a stress-free environment, so for me it’s a case of managing that, making sure everyone’s doing their job right.”
TarraWarra is a wholly different proposition, and it’s hard not to lick your lips at the prospect of what Fagan will do with it. Established in 1983, this 26-hectare estate is a north-facing bank of 25 blocks along a 3km stretch between Healesville and Yarra Glen. Fagan is pleased to have a second source for the Burgundy varieties—the leased Swallowfield Vineyard near Gembrook—to play with. Farmed by TarraWarra's ex-Mount Mary and ex-Seville Estate viticulturist Chris Beard, this cooler Upper Yarra site on decomposed granite promises to bring some nervier fruit into the mix. On the home site, she commands a block of Rhône white varieties plus Shiraz, Barbera and Nebbiolo alongside Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Tasting the 2024 components from barrel, you already sense Fagan getting to grips with all these materials and teasing out their strengths. As the blocks are tuned to her sharpening ear, these wines are going to sing.
Ted Lemon tells me he’s glad but “not at all surprised” to hear my enthusiasm over what I tasted from barrel. “Watching Sarah advance in her career, I was always disappointed that her name did not appear more often on the lists of the best winemakers in Australia,” he says. “It is one thing to make excellent wine at a boutique operation where a winemaker can concentrate on small amounts of wine, and quite another to make outstanding wines, in all price ranges, at a large producer like De Bortoli.” McMahon, too, looks forward to seeing Fagan’s gift cast in a new light. “I’m excited to see what she does at TarraWarra. Now that she gets to be a bit more stylistic and make the wines she wants to make, I think we’ll see more of her personality showing.”
Sarah’s Yarra
“Ultimately, wine is an opinion, so whose opinion is better?” says Fagan when the subject switches to the future. She means it modestly; there is not a jot of arrogance about her that suggests she views her own tastes as superior. At the same time, she is incisive and forthright. Having tasted and judged with her, that plain, matter-of-factness comes across as clarity of thought. The wines will be deliberate and precise; that’s already clear. And there won’t be any look-at-me flashiness—that definitely isn’t her style.
To this point, she gestures towards the TarraWarra surroundings, indisputably beautiful but unshowy. The elegant, restrained Allan Powell-designed Museum of Art is set back from the road and discreetly in keeping with the landscape. Fagan takes it as a symbol of the humility, calm and sophistication of the founding Besen family. Eva and Marc Besen, who died in 2021 and ’23 respectively, were two of Australia's foremost philanthropists. They established the Besen Family Foundation in 1978 and Museum of Art in 2003. In autumn 2025, the Eva and Marc Besen Centre will open, including a learning centre, performance space and visible storage of over 300 artworks from the museum’s collection. High culture is writ large but doesn’t weigh it down at all.
Fagan certainly isn’t seeking immortality from the wines, but she wants them to be memorable and meaningful, connecting people to the place, its values and a sense of pleasure. She wants to foster affection and a desire to return. The TarraWarra style, which tended to sit at the richer, heavier, perhaps more conservative end of the spectrum, already shows intent toward vim, vitality and lighter detail. “I think the people want to drink wines younger and earlier,” she says. “No one’s really cellaring wines anymore. If we can get wines on the tasting bench that are alluring and inviting, and people go and drink them outside on the deck and have a happy time and go, ‘Shit, that was pretty delicious,’ then we’ve done our job.”
TarraWarra is in a warm spot, and Fagan is acutely aware of the need “to be more reflective, climate- and vintage-wise”. That means everything coming in pristine and prompt at harvest time, with ripe but bright flavours, then processing the fruit gently in a winery that Fagan’s already tweaking for better use of space and more seamless flow. Crucially, it means gearing all the blocks towards this vision, and it sounds like Fagan, Beard and vineyard manager Stuart Sissins—who joined the team in 1997—have every clone and row under the microscope to discern their potential and needs.
At the end of the day, Fagan sets a high bar for what these vines must deliver. Vintages at Littorai, G.D. Vajra in Piemonte and Leitz in the Rheingau inform a taste for disarming and deceptively complete wines. “Ultimately, the wines have got to be interesting. They’ve got to smell good, with an alluring aroma that makes you go, ‘Yeah, I want to drink that’. Balanced, refreshing and clean and pretty humble as well—kind of comfortable in their own skin, and that comes from vineyard-derived health and old vines and things like that.”
As a Cowra-girl now firmly wedded to the Yarra Valley, the candle she holds to this place still burns bright. Notwithstanding the general challenges of nature, this cool to moderate climate is conducive to growing good grapes, and it’s a gorgeous part of the world to live and work, she says. She also enjoys the diverse wine scene. “You’ve got the younger generations coming through now, all hanging out together, and there’s a good spark among them. It’s nice to see that continuity of a region still having a good life.” And then there are more seasoned players, like her former mentor Steve Webber and highly respected close friends like Bridgeman, Bicknell, Steve Flamsteed and Caroline Mooney. “There is a level of consideration and seriousness in their thinking, but at the end of the day, they’re pretty down-to-earth people who are pretty humble, and wine is not all-consuming,” she says of this older guard, to which this once-green De Bortoli recruit now belongs. “There are other things to life, whether that’s music, travel, food—or doing nothing.”
