A small coterie of Australian winemakers have earned their place as old world insiders. Here, three explain what it takes to build a life and a business on hallowed foreign soil—by Max Allen.
In the spring of 2019, winemaker Mark Haisma planted an acre of shiraz vines. Nothing unusual about that: Haisma is Australian, and for many years worked at the celebrated Yarra Yering winery in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, making some of the finest shiraz in the country. What makes his new vineyard remarkable is where it sits—on the other side of the world, in Macon, Burgundy, the spiritual home of pinot noir and chardonnay, where shiraz is not an officially prescribed grape variety.
“Oh, I get lots of comments from the locals, I can tell you,” says Haisma with a mischievous smile. “Things like ‘so you’re the mad [fool] who planted shiraz’, but they all want to taste it.”
Haisma has been making wine in Burgundy since 2009, when he left the Yarra and moved to Europe with his family. He started out buying small parcels of grapes from a couple of growers. Today he owns 6ha of vines across four appellations—and makes a cornas from the northern Rhône, where shiraz is very much allowed—and is regarded as one of the region’s leading winemakers.
He is one of a handful of Australian winemakers who have decamped to Europe to live, work and build successful businesses, usually navigating local bureaucracy and cultural resistance before earning their place.
Gippsland-born Jane Eyre worked her first vintage in Burgundy in 1998. She fell so completely in love with the region that she moved there full-time in 2004, and in 2011, encouraged by her French colleagues, decided to make wines under her eponymous label. Like Haisma, she began by buying grapes from local growers and renting space in other people’s wineries.
“To buy grapes in Burgundy you first have to set up as a negociant,” Eyre explains. “So I went into the chamber of commerce and came out with an A4 page covered front to back with the names and numbers of everyone I had to contact just to set up my business. I had no idea where to start.”
The first official she approached threw her out three times. She eventually had to bring a French speaking winemaker friend just to get the magic approval code. “My boss at the time bought me a new barrel because I didn’t have any money,” she remembers. “And a friend from Australia lent me $5000.”
The struggle paid off. In 2020, just nine years after starting out, Eyre was named Negociant of the Year by prestigious French wine magazine La Revue du vin de France—the first woman to receive the award.
“Good land in Barbaresco can cost around €2m per hectare, but you can get lucky if you live and work here long enough.”
Adelaide-born David Fletcher fell in love with nebbiolo after drinking barolo and barbaresco in Melbourne, and in 2007 flew to Piedmont, north-west Italy, with a dream of working with the variety. He became so taken with the region that he moved there permanently with his young family in 2012, buying the abandoned local train station in Barbaresco and converting it into a fermenting cellar. Along with his wife Eleanor, Fletcher now owns two wineries and 3.6ha of vines. Last year he became an Italian citizen.
“The hardest thing was getting access to vineyards,” Fletcher says. “Good land in Barbaresco can cost around €2m per hectare, but you can get lucky if you live and work
here long enough.” He has done both for over a decade now, and patience, it turns out, has its rewards. “We managed to get hold of a piece of the Starderi cru for much less because I happened to mention to my electrician that I was looking for land. He spoke to someone who spoke to someone and… we got lucky.”
Vineyard land is not the only cost that dwarfs anything an Australian winemaker might expect at home. Grape prices from Burgundy’s most prized sites are stratospheric.
“In 2019 I was offered some fruit from Corton, a grand cru,” says Eyre. “It was around €150,000 per tonne—about thirty times what a winemaker in Australia would pay for good pinot noir.” It is also why the 2023 vintage of her Corton Grand Cru costs over AUD$500 a bottle. “It actually breaks my heart as a lover of wine, as a producer of Burgundy, as a buyer of Burgundian grapes,” she says. “Some of these wines have become so unaffordable that people who love wine and want to understand them simply can’t anymore. Because of the small quantities and the huge demand, they’re priced out of most pockets.”
So why persist in Burgundy or Barbaresco, when it would be much easier—and cheaper—to follow a winemaking dream back home?
After 15 years in the region, Haisma is quick to puncture Burgundy’s carefully cultivated bucolic myth. Behind the image of the humble farmer tending his small plot lies a shrewd and well-established business culture. “If you have the right contacts and a certain amount of cash, anyone can come in and get hold of fruit from some really [coveted] vineyards,” he says. “I don’t think there’s another place in the world where you can do that: it’s not like I could ever rock up to Stephen Henschke and ask to buy a couple of tonnes of Hill of Grace shiraz.”
For Fletcher, basing his business in Piedmont makes sense on several levels. The region—northern, well connected, at the crossroads of Italian and European wine culture—makes equal sense as a strategic business base and an exceptional setting for family life. “It’s a great place to make wine, a historical place, and it’s so easy to reach international markets from here,” he says. “We export to 20 countries, which has been a huge opportunity I don’t think I’d have had if I’d stayed at home.”
All three have now been in their adopted regions long enough to leave a mark on them.
In 2021, Eyre bought her own winery in the village of Cissey, just outside Beaune, the region’s historic capital. “A lot more micro-negociants have started up in Burgundy since I set up my business,” she says. “They realise that the world wants to drink high-quality pinot noir.” As La revue du vin de France noted recently, Eyre’s handcrafted wines are elevating the image of the negociant altogether.
Haisma’s shiraz vineyard was always planted with more than mischief in mind. It was a serious viticultural question posed to one of the world’s most tradition bound regions: as the climate shifts and Burgundy warms, what does the future of this ancient landscape actually look like?
The locals used to laugh. Some of them are now asking the same thing.
“Since I planted, I’ve seen other people putting in different grapes in Burgundy, too,” he says. “Maybe there are a few other questions being asked about the future.” Not so mad, after all.
