There’s a way of looking at terroir that places geology and climate on a pedestal as the preeminent forces that shape a wine’s sense of place. But there’s another way of looking at terroir as a synthesis of place and people. In this conception, the soils, the weather, and the plants that grow are modulated by—and interpreted through—the deep, historical cultural practices of the people who have been farming, working, eating, and living in the places where wine comes from.

This is what some of us writers mean when we say that people are as much a part of terroir as the dirt, and it’s a realization William Downie came to after working for several years in Burgundy.

“There’s always this problem translating terroir into English,” says Downie. “Yes, there’s soil and climate and aspect, but the thing that is rarely spoken about is the cultural connection to place. The French don’t speak about it because it’s so instinctual, it never even occurs to them to explain it. Terroir is a French concept, but when you think about Spain, or Italy, or elsewhere, the role of culture changes the outcome, and that outcome is so vastly different. Eventually, I realized I could never make a true wine of place in Burgundy.”

“I’m made of this place. I’m formed of this landscape. Every cell of my body comes from this soil.”

Which is why Downie isn’t working in Burgundy anymore. Instead, he’s living in a tiny, ancient farmhouse on a hill in Gippsland, 121 km southeast of Melbourne, Australia, a few kilometers from where he was born and raised.

There, and only there, does he feel like he belongs.

“I’m made of this place,” he says. “I’m formed of this landscape. Every cell of my body comes from this soil. I don’t ever have to check the weather app to know what is going to happen. I can walk out the door and tell if it’s going to rain. That’s something that changes your relationship to the place. It changes the work. In Burgundy, it was about ‘wine production.’ Here, the reasons for doing what we’re doing are entirely different. Yes, we’re growing wine, but we’re also repairing our landscape.”

Downie, 50, grizzled and bearded, is settling into what he believes are the golden years of his career. “The thirties and forties were just too damn hard.”

From Bass to Bass

Downie’s dreams, like so many in youth, started out big. “Right out of high school, I was a bass player in a not-very-successful rock band. Which wasn’t a great way to make money. But that was fine, because at the time, all I would have spent it on was beer, and when you’re in a rock band, the beer is free,” he says with a smile.

Eventually, Downie realized he needed to make a better living, so in his mid-20s, he started working at a liquor store. The owner told him there was no money in beer and liquor and speculated that they really needed to get into wine. So he signed Downie and himself up for some wine appreciation classes. Downie took to wine almost immediately.

“What drew me to wine was that a wine could taste like it came from somewhere. That sense of place sucked me in immediately,” says Downie.

His boss encouraged him to apply for a “Working With Wine” fellowship through a local education provider, which Downie won. As part of that fellowship, he had to write a final paper profiling a winery. He chose the most famous (and at that point, the only truly significant) winery in his home region of Gippsland: Bass Philip, run by iconoclastic, irascible winemaker Philip Jones.

“I called up Philip and asked him if I could come interview him, and he said no. A few weeks later, I called him up again and asked, and he said no. I called him a while later and he said, ‘No, I’m too busy pruning.’ So I offered to come help him prune, and interviewed him as we worked down the rows.”

Downie got his interview and evidently made an impression on Jones, who called him up a few months later and said gruffly that he needed someone to help him out—would Downie like to give it a shot?

He worked with Jones for two years until, as Downie puts it, he had “the inevitable falling out that one has with Philip Jones.”

“I don’t have a problem with Philip, but Philip has a problem with me,” Downie says with a shrug. He then went to work for de Bortoli, a position that gave him the opportunity to work with the winery’s partners in Burgundy, helping set up a micro-négociant operation. That meant working with various producers, including—ironically—Domaine Fourrier, who have recently taken over the Bass Philip estate.

“For five years, I worked back and forth in Burgundy. That was a pretty interesting, stressful, and remarkable time for me,” says Downie. “Until I got on that plane to Burgundy, the farthest I’d ever flown was to Tasmania once. Spending time in Burgundy seemed like an absolutely implausible fantasy, and within a year I was making wine there.”

It was there that he also met his wife, Rachel, who was working for Kermit Lynch in Beaune.

Finding His Way (Back) to Place

Burgundy proved instrumental in shaping Downie’s understanding of terroir and wine, and in establishing the fundamentals of Pinot Noir winemaking in his mind—something he now dismisses as incidental (though not unimportant) to what he’s trying to do as a winegrower.

“I’m a viticulturist. I still don’t really care about winemaking. I don’t find it to be of real interest or consequence. Winemakers are boring. I only ended up working in wineries by accident. What I really care about is viticulture. If you look from pruning to putting the wine in the bottle, the winemaking part is only about 10% of the time.”

“I don’t want to spend another cent on winemaking equipment. Spending money on winemaking equipment is a waste.”

For Downie, the point is to grow vines in a place with as much integrity as possible (in his case, using regenerative organic agriculture) and then see what they’re capable of expressing in liquid form, which necessarily requires someone to make the wine.

To Downie, this means, “Grapes in a tank and that’s it.” Grapes are harvested and sorted “with me and my mom and dad” on a conveyor belt. They’re then destemmed and dumped into round, wooden, open-top fermenters. There, they ferment with ambient yeasts (unless things don’t finish, in which case Downie adds yeast), no temperature control, no punchdowns, and only occasional pumpovers.

“I don’t own a thermometer,” he says. “I do have a hydrometer, but I never really use it. I look under a microscope for Brett, and that’s about it. Eggs, amphora? They’re too fucking hard. I don’t want to spend another cent on winemaking equipment. Spending money on winemaking equipment is a waste. I had a 1981 roto press until a couple of years ago. The only reason I replaced it was because it was an incredibly dangerous machine—you could easily kill yourself using it. I bought a new press for safety; otherwise I’d still be using that old thing.”

I met Downie at what I might consider the midpoint of his wine journey. Downie, however, doesn’t believe he’s anywhere close to the middle. “I’ll be quite satisfied if in my lifetime I get to the starting line.”

He’s now planted about 2 hectares of vineyard on his home farm in the pure volcanic soils of his local section of Gippsland, known as the Baw Baw Shire. He farms these vines with as much intention as possible on a small property that also includes orchards, vegetable gardens, and the animals that his wife Rachel uses to make her cheeses.

“We’re first-generation farmers who didn’t inherit any money,” says Downie. “Everything we do has to be from selling bottles of wine. And when you’re an idiot like me and want 10,000 plants per hectare in a climate that gives you 1,200 mils of rain a year, it’s an incredibly long, difficult thing. We just have to go slow.”

Hands on the Land

Downie’s Guendulain Farm is perched on a hill overlooking the highway to Melbourne in the distance.

“Every time I drove to Melbourne, I’d go past this hill, and I thought it looked like a great place to grow vines,” says Downie. “I spent a decade looking at it, daydreaming, and wondering.”

One day, on his way to visit family who lived nearby, he pointed the hill out to Rachel and said, “That’s the hill I’ve been telling you about.” She convinced him to pull off the highway and take a proper look.

Lo and behold, there was a For Sale sign on a property halfway up.

“When we found out how much the place was, we realized banks were never going to lend us that kind of money,” says Downie. He resigned himself to the idea that it was probably out of reach, and they kept saving and looked elsewhere.

Two years and a lot of savings later, Downie rang the realtor to ask if he’d seen anything similar on the market.

“Oh,” said the realtor, “that property is still available.”

They made the best offer they could muster. It was rejected. They stretched a bit further—rejected again. They moved on. Then, a few months later, the realtor called back: his client really needed the money, and if they could come up with another $5k, the property was theirs. It took them three more years of saving before they could afford to plant vines, which they finally did in 2008.

The Taste of Baw Baw

Downie has yet to commercially bottle a wine made exclusively from his vineyard. The yields from his roughly 1 hectare of mature vines have been spotty at best.

“Our soils are full of iron, but the plants are iron-deficient,” says Downie, shaking his head. “After a while, we started mapping monthly sap flow and realized we needed to spray a foliar iron supplement.”

Downie is fully committed to regenerative organic farming, but disease pressure can sometimes force his hand. “We rarely compromise here on the farm,” he says. But at times there’s no choice but to spray phosphorous acid. It’s organic, but not permitted under local regenerative organic certification. “We’ve fallen in and out of certification for a few years,” he says.

It’s unclear whether he’ll ever produce enough wine from the home vineyard to support his family, so in the meantime, he’s making wines from several leased vineyards around Gippsland and other sites in Victoria, including the Mornington Peninsula.

He briefly considered limiting his wines to Gippsland. But there simply aren’t enough vineyards in the region, so after a short hiatus, he returned to making wine from Mornington again.

Downie’s wine range includes a bottling called Cathedral—an entry-level blend of all his vineyard sites, serving as his workhorse and cash-flow wine. His second tier includes regional blends from Mornington and Gippsland. At the top, he produces two single-vineyard wines from Gippsland: one from the exposed ridgetop site Camp Hill, and one from the sheltered vineyard Bull Swamp—both on iron-rich, weathered basalt soils.

“When you finally get a chance to taste this vineyard’s wines on their own, they’re not going to taste like anywhere else in the world. That’s the point of all this.”

The Baw Baw Shire, where his home vineyard lies, takes its name from the subalpine plateau that rises from the Gippsland plain, separating the region from the Victorian Alps. The name Baw Baw comes from the Yarra-Yallock, Gunna-Kurnai people of Gippsland. While its meaning is uncertain, it’s believed to mean “echo.”

Downie’s wines are wonderfully textural, combining refinement with an honest lack of polish that gives them charm and personality. While we know minerals don’t translate directly into flavors, there’s no doubt that—especially in his single-vineyard wines—a volcanic character shines through. A particular tannic texture often accompanies what your mind might interpret as a faintly rust-like flavor amidst the berries and dried herbs.

The wines are slightly softer in acidity than I’d prefer, though not so much that they feel unbalanced. They’re quite delicious—but that doesn’t yet satisfy Downie, who freely admits his dissatisfaction.

“I’m not really satisfied at all,” he grumbles. “There are so many things that can be better. They taste like Pinot Noir, but like Pinot Noir from anywhere that can make a decent version of the grape. When you finally get a chance to taste this vineyard’s wines on their own, they’re not going to taste like anywhere else in the world. That’s the point of all this.”

Downie didn’t have any of the few precious bottles from his home vineyard at the little farmhouse, and a scheduling snafu cut my visit short. We didn’t have time to visit the winery to taste them.

So I’m joining the list of people—including Downie—still waiting to see what his hillside is truly going to taste like.

Tasting Notes

2024 William Downie “Cathedral” Pinot Noir, Victoria, Australia
Light garnet in the glass, this wine smells of resinous herbs and berries. In the mouth, tangy raspberry, plum skin, and dried herbs have a lovely savoury, earthy note to them, with excellent acidity. Lightly grippy tannins have an athletic profile. Made from a blend of various sites. 13.5% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $33. click to buy.

2023 William Downie Pinot Noir, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, Australia
A hazy light to medium garnet in the glass, this wine smells of candied raspberry and orange peel. In the mouth, raspberry and candied redcurrant flavors have a Red Vines® character. Lightly dusty tannins and very good acidity deliver hints of orange peel and cranberry in the finish. 13% alcohol. Score: around 9. Cost: $60. click to buy.

2023 William Downie Pinot Noir, Gippsland, Victoria, Australia
Light to medium garnet in the glass, this wine smells of resinous herbs, red berries, and dusty roads. In the mouth, there’s lovely redcurrant and raspberry fruit with dusty tannins, dried and fresh herbs, and a hint of flowers. Lovely stony notes at the heart of an earthy, rusty core. From a vineyard planted in 1983. 12.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $70. click to buy.

2023 William Downie “Camp Hill” Pinot Noir, Gippsland, Victoria, Australia
Light garnet in the glass, this wine smells of raspberry, freshly turned earth, and flowers. In the mouth, the wine is silky AF, with gorgeous raspberry and redcurrant flavors mixed with a touch of meatiness, savoury herbs, sirt, and a silty, supple tannic profile. Very good acidity. A higher-elevation, windy site (250m). 12.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $95.

2023 Wiliam Downie “Bull Swamp” Pinot Noir, Gippsland, Victoria, Australia
Light garnet in color, this wine smells of raspberries and chopped herbs. In the mouth, more muscular tannins have a firm grip on raspberry and redcurrant flavors mixed with dusty herbs and flowers. There’s a faint salinity here that lingers through a long and very pretty finish. From a lower elevation, sheltered, location. 12.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $95. click to buy.