What KT did: A Clare love affair
Kerri Thompson has always been drawn to dots. Various colours, sizes and arrangements speckle the labels of Wines by KT, evoking order and randomness at once. They’re designed by Melanie Terrett, an artist apparently at ease with an abstract brief. “When I asked, ‘I want something that takes into account the soil, the grapes and the planets to cover the whole cycle of winegrowing’, she didn’t look at me like I was a complete psychopath,” says Thompson. She isn’t dotty, by the way, and her wines don’t want for clarity and coherence. But premeditation takes a back seat to impulse and instinct in the KT universe; the things she cares about are the pinpoints, and a picture emerges. The dots connecting her to the Clare Valley and its community are the ones you can’t miss.
Thompson grew up in Adelaide with a love of the land fostered on the wheat and sheep farm of her maternal grandmother, Melva, who lends her name to Thompson’s off-dry Riesling. She had no link to wine when she started, though—and she started young. In fact, wine itself was an abstract notion within which were pooled a miscellany of her adolescent interests. “What’s Shiraz?” she asked of a Roseworthy classmate on the bus ride to the Barossa during O-Week of her winemaking course. She’d enrolled at the age of 17, and the uni had to get her a fake ID so she could take part in tastings. She was good at chemistry and biology “but sort of knew I didn’t want to be stuck in a laboratory wearing a white coat for the rest of my life”. She was also into art history, had studied Italian from a young age and had caught the travel bug from trips to Asia in her teens. “The thought of studying winemaking sounded incredibly exotic,” she says. “This was in the early ’90s and the Australian wine industry was really taking off internationally. It was like, ‘Wow, I could travel the world with this’.”
Within two years of earning her Oenology degree at Adelaide University in 1993, she was off doing her first vintage with flagship Chianti producer Isole e Olena. “I was incredibly lucky because at that point in time, Isole was taking off in the US market and they were becoming globally famous,” she says. “Paolo (de Marchi, proprietor from 1976 to 2023) was very hands-on and it was a wonderful time to be a part of that before they grew too large.” Two years later, she returned to Tuscany after completing vintage in Beaujolais.
Talking big and small business at AAVWS 2024. Photo credit: Roberto Pettinau
Those European harvests had a profound and lasting impact on Thompson’s winemaking. “If you look at the style in Australia at the time, higher-alcohol fruit bombs were gaining in popularity. And I just remember that relationship between acid and tannin creating these incredibly savoury, quite sapid wines that overwhelmed with their intensity without being big blockbusters. They were wines that really crept up on you.” Notably with Sangiovese but also with Gamay, managing tannin through fermentation regimes and working the cap of grape skins was key, as was the expression of fresh acidity. “In McLaren Vale at the time, it was not unusual to be throwing bags of acid and tannin everywhere, and I sort of came home thinking, ‘I’ve found a new way’—which is, obviously, not a new way.”
Thompson’s formative years in Australia were likewise populated with memorable mentors and talented colleagues. She started out at Wirra Wirra guided by the legendary Greg Trott before joining the star-studded cast at industry giant BRL Hardy under the likes of Stephen Pannell, Peter Dawson and Ed Carr. Mentorship, knowledge sharing, cutting-edge research with the AWRI and healthy peer competition were part and parcel of those Hardys years, as were hard work and a focus on driving quality at all levels within set parameters. “And It was heaps of fun,” says Thompson. “We were lucky to have been a part of that story at a time when the wine community really supported trial work, experimentation and the bravado of youth, where you think you can achieve anything. I wouldn't be in the position I am now without having had that experience and that discipline back in those days. It was an amazing time with people I'm still really good mates with nowadays.”
Those peers—the likes of Sue Bell, Rob Mann, Alex Mackay, Cynthea Semmens and Anna Flowerday—have now dispersed to WA, ACT, Tasmania and beyond, but are unified by several lessons. “I think that time reminded us to have respect for a region and what the region does well, and then making those traditional styles in a more interesting, focused and perhaps more modern way,” says Thompson. “We were all part of that crew, and everyone is celebrating their traditional varieties in their traditional regions, but at the same time they're also doing some weird and wacky and fun things that are making it that little bit more layered.”
Thompson herself wound up in the Clare Valley at the turn of the century, heading up the 1893-founded Leasingham winery. Things started to change after U.S. drinks leviathan Constellation Brands bought BRL Hardy in 2003. A few years in, there was talk of Leasingham morphing from a Clare standard-bearer to a South Eastern Australian brand, and Thompson saw the writing on the wall. “I’d been thinking about moving on and then my grower, Bunny Peglidis—God love him—rang and said, ‘Look, I don’t have anywhere for my grapes.’ This is a beautiful vineyard site in Watervale that I’ve now been working with for nearly 20 years. And I said, ‘Don’t ring anyone else. I’ll take them’.” A few days later, she quit Leasingham and set herself up for vintage 2007.
Riesling, rosé and Shiraz were the first releases Thompson presented to the trade under the Wines by KT label. Riesling has been the linchpin of the range from the outset, with its maker always strolling well beyond the strict boundaries of its steely stereotype. “Riesling, first and foremost, is a bloody great drink, but I've really enjoyed its diversity,” she says. “When I first started my label, I released a Riesling inspired by the wines of Alsace—all wild ferment in older barrels, lots of lees stirring and really trying to create something a lot more textural and exotic. Back in the early days, that was very much a hand-sell, really trying to educate people that Watervale Riesling could be all of these different shapes and textures, Now I feel like the wine world has taken to those styles, particularly out in trade; somms are great supporters of those styles. Drinking wines from around the world, particularly Rieslings from all around, that's been one of my big joys, so I wanted to emulate that.”
At the time of writing, there are no fewer than six iterations of Riesling for sale on the Wines by KT website. The other whites are Pinot Gris and Vermentino, a Mediterranean grape Thompson feels works well in Clare where you can get “a bit of grunt and chew” to go with the appealing perfume and natural acidity. To that end, it ferments with indigenous yeasts partially in old barrels. “I've really found the window for harvesting Vermentino to be very narrow. It's getting it after it's just green and herbal and edgy and not particularly fun, on the cusp before it's completely blown out to be a much bigger, rounder, more blousy style. I find Clare to be open to that, with that textural interest and still maintaining the fresh, lovely, crunchy, sea-salty thing that Vermentino does.”
With her reds, Thompson is far from alone in taking inspiration from the Bradys of Wendouree, and finds Clare conducive to the fresher, subtler styles that she favours. “I think it's important to remember that we are making wine in Australia and conditions are clearly quite different [from Europe]. But that's really what drew me to Clare; I find a lot of similarities with that acid-tannin relationship here, with our elevation, diurnal temperature fluctuation, soil types and stuff like that, leaning it more into the savoury, finer-framed styles. That’s really what inspired me about this region and continues to do so.”
The acid-tannin synergy is not the only relationship Thompson holds sacred; there is also the bond between grower and producer. A jealous obsession with the domaines of the so-called Old World suggest that is the production model par excellence, condemning the ubiquitous Australian partnership between grape-grower and winemaker to second-class status. Thompson would love to see these wine-growing collaborations accorded a greater degree of respect—including by those within the relationship. After a couple of low-yielding, frosted seasons, and with the wine industry facing various headwinds, she’s acutely aware of the need for mutual support. “Some growers are sort of going, ‘What the hell am I doing this for?’ And, you know, if we're all working separately, then we're going to lose some of those beautiful old vineyard sites.”
Thompson recalls her time at Wirra Wirra, where Greg Trott spoke with enormous fondness of his growers, who became extended family. At Leasingham, she worked with about 50 growers with holdings ranging from one to 100 acres. “I really struggled with that separation because we very much had to treat them as a number,” says Thompson. “But, of course, I never did; I became friends with a lot of these growers and really tried to work with them. I was always like, ‘Look, these people are my neighbours.’ So, it was important to me, and it remains important. It's about working with the right people that have the same philosophy. We're all wanting to farm in a responsible, ecological fashion. And I hope that, you know, we’re riding the waves together.”
The championing of her growers extends to building labels around the vineyard name, with the likes of Bunny and Yvonne Peglidis immortalised in Thompson’s most famous single-site bottlings. And—an example, perhaps, of not riding the waves together—it backfired when she lost access to her beloved Churinga Vineyard fruit when the property was sold without her knowledge. “Yeah, look, that was quite heartbreaking,” she recalls. “I'd worked with that site for nearly 20 years and I'd identified it as a beautiful site [at Leasingham], not just for the grapes, but it was very picturesque and I feel it was quite spiritual, too. I subsequently had a number of meetings with local Ngadjuri elders at that site and believe it to have been quite special, with lots of stories to tell. And look, shit happens, doesn't it? But that was a prime example of where sometimes I work with my heart more so than my head.”
Thankfully, Thompson continues to work with her heart, and special relationships happily endure. When Wines by KT was born, her friends Dave and Diana Palmer let her realise and raise her wares at their gorgeous Skillogalee property. When the Palmers sold up in 2021, she “claimed squatter’s rights” from new owner Simon Clausen, who not only allowed her to stay but engaged her as winemaker alongside her operations manager, Brendan Pudney. Throughout the years, she has continued to nurture all manner of partnerships across the Clare community as a grower, buyer, contractor, consultant and friend—and she’s thoroughly thankful that all those dots remain on her radar. “You know, after working in a big company and working really closely with a lot of great winemakers and mentors, when you do go out on your own, it's quite a confronting, lonely road for a little while. When you're used to being surrounded by a lot of inspiration, you obviously then have to create your own. So, working with other people in that respect was really important to me.”
And then there’s the nucleus, Clare itself, around which all the dots cluster. I told KT —let’s face it, that’s what everyone calls her—that something really clicked for me in Clare. It was, effectively, the place where I fell in love with wine; something about how, scattered about the Riesling trail, was such a singular, timeless, character-soaked cosmos smelling of citrus, dust and sunshine. “It's funny because when people say to me, ‘What is it about Clare that you really love?’, one of the first things that comes to mind is absolutely how it smells, the feeling in autumn and how the sun sets on the range,” she replies. “And I have always just put that down to the fact that I have some ancestry that has come from these parts. I've always felt very much at home here.
“For me, it is absolutely more than just the wine. I mean, obviously every region comes with its beauties and different people are drawn to different things, but Clare just makes so much sense to me. And when you think about the ancient geology here and the story about sedimentary rock and creating the ridgelines, I feel like there's so many layers, but it's all sort of wrapped up in a really nice, neat parcel. So yeah, obviously I can talk about Clare forever. It's very dear to me.”
