25 years on: Jane Faulkner looks back at Deviation Road's sparkling wine legacy

To kick off 25 years of Deviation Road, Kate and Hamish Laurie – two of the best wine folk you’ll ever meet – allowed a handful of guests to disgorge a few special bottles. We were gathered at the winery in beautiful Longwood, nestled in the Adelaide Hills, for what turned out to be a highly entertaining and informative masterclass to celebrate the milestone. 

She the winemaker, he a fifth-generation vigneron, tending the land but also running production and sales. Both know the meaning of patience. Sparkling winemaking is all about respecting what time does. It’s alchemy, where an embryonic, neutral-in-comparison wine morphs into something special, detailed and complex. 

The event began in the morning with a retrospective tasting of four vintages of their top wine, the blanc de blancs Beltana, plus five vintages of Loftia, a pinot noir/chardonnay blend. It was also a comparison of lees ageing versus cork ageing – or rather DIAM, which is made from micro-agglomerated cork. 

“We use DIAM, which removes the issue of cork taint, but I also see that closure as positive because sparkling under cork can go a bit mushroomy,” says Kate. 

It meant the wines were incredibly fresh, yet still showing their aged characters beautifully. The comparison between the original release of the ’11 Beltana (dosage 11gm/L, disgorged November 2016, five years on lees and eight years on cork) to one disgorged by a guest half an hour before the tasting (zero dosage, 14 years on lees) is edifying. 

“There’s a lot of conversation in the industry about the influence of yeast lees ageing on sparkling wine and the aromatic profile versus the influence of cork, because yeast is a natural antioxidant of the ageing process. Once you remove the yeast via disgorgment and put a cork in, you no longer have that freshness barrier and the wine starts to evolve slightly faster, and you get fruit compote or marmalade characters. That’s today’s lesson!”

The just-disgorged ’11 is absurdly fresh and vibrant, with a tight acid line and excellent length belying its age. But Kate says the ’11 under cork still has “a long way to go. I like the balance and it’s drinking so well now, but what I love is that there’s still life in them, and that comes back to place.”

These last bottles of museum stock are to showcase what drives Hamish and Kate, which is “the patience required to create the sparkling wine we set out to make so many years ago, now finally hitting the lees age we wanted,” Kate says.

She recalls saying to Hamish when they made the first Beltana and Loftia wines in 2008, after she’d studied and worked in Champagne in the Côte de Blancs. “I said, babe, this is what we’ll do, we’ll make a wine, age it for seven years on lees, and show Australia how to do it. He said ‘yeah, and we’ll be broke, babe’.”

The reality of running a small family business means it’s taken years to now be in a position where Beltana is the wine she envisioned. It spends at least six years on lees before release – the ’18 is due out soon – while Loftia spends a minimum of three years on lees. They also have a range of multi-vintages, late-disgorged releases and of course, excellent still wines, too. 

“Our sparkling wines are all made in stainless steel tanks to preserve their beautiful fruit qualities. Deviation Road’s style is very much about capturing the freshness of the season and preserving it, then we get the journey of time coming into it.” 

She talks about leaving a void, or an airiness, in the young wine which only time can fill, and tasting the nascent 2025 Beltana from tank offers a brilliant insight into what she means. Be patient. There’s another six or so years of space to be filled before its release.