Description
Tom and Nadège Carson have long made their home in the Yarra Valley, with Serrat being their personal project driven by a desire to truly test what is possible from their surrounds. The humble 3.5 hectares of vines is situated just outside the Yarra Glen township, in the heart of the Yarra—roughly an hour’s drive north-east from Melbourne.
Initial plantings went in the ground in 2001, during which time Tom was working as Chief Winemaker at the nearby Yering Station. The vineyard’s north-facing aspect, combined with low fertility soils, provided the initial framework for quality wine production. Uniformly dispersed through the vineyard, the grey to grey-brown clays have buckshot gravels amongst the topsoil, upon a subsoil of red-brown clay impregnated with ancient deteriorated mudstones.
Combined, Tom and Nadège have more than 70 years of wine experience, spanning all elements of the industry. Nadège’s story begins in Banyuls, where she was groomed to take over her family’s vineyards. After completing a trio of degrees in winemaking, wine marketing and winery management, she ventured down to Australia for a vintage in 1990—but never quite managed to make it back to southern France. The following eighteen years saw her managing a number of wineries’ various departments, spanning Marketing to Strategic Projects across multiple regions. At the same time, she developed Mercurey Australia, an import arm for French oak barrels, and a small quality-focussed Burgundy import portfolio. These two businesses, alongside Serrat, are Nadège’s primary focusses now.
Tom graduated from illustrious Roseworthy College in 1991 as a winemaker. What came next was a combination of years working both in the Yarra Valley and Burgundy, before joining the Mornington Peninsula’s Yabby Lake in 2008 as General Manager and Chief Winemaker; a position he still holds now. A small fraction of recognition which Tom has received over the years include:
• Winemaker of the Year 2004, from Wine and Spirit International Competition
• Viticulturist of the Year 2023, along with finalist for Winery of the Year and Winemaker of the Year 2023 from the Halliday Wine Companion Awards: the only person to have ever been nominated for all three awards in a single year
• Dux of the Len Evans Tutorial 2002: the preeminent wine show judging ‘boot camp’, and “most exclusive wine school in the world” which has shaped many of Australia’s greatest wine show judges and overall palates
• Awarded the Jimmy Watson—the country’s top honour for ‘Best Young Red Wine’ from the Royal Melbourne Wine Show—in 2013, for his Yabby Lake Block 1 Pinot Noir 2012: the first time in the 50+ years of the award that it was ever awarded to a Pinot Noir
Suffice to say, the Carson household is truly a wine-focussed establishment. The wines are very much an embodiment of their makers: calmly spoken with an assuredness to them. These aren’t wines that need to shout to make their presence known, in a prototypical archaic Australian fashion: these are wines that tell a story of reasoned cool-climate viticulture, with a focus upon terroir in place of overt winemaking thumbprints. These aren’t wines that have chased fads over the years: they were part of the generation of wines that established a new paradigm in the vein of modern Australia.
Coming from the Catalan word for ‘high density’, Serrat is planted to 8,800 vines per hectare: more than four times the average density you find in Australia, and very much akin to those you would find across Burgundy. Increased densities lead to a greatly reduced yield per vine; resulting on average in one vine yielding just one bottle—or roughly one-third of yields commonly seen in premium producing regions, and less than one-sixth that of other regions. The cumulative choices made at Serrat are all led by a north star focussed upon quality.
In Australia, high-end restaurants and speciality retailers happily take their scarce allocations—making their presence in Singapore an even greater treat. That being said, volumes available mean that these won’t be around for all too long.
