NEWS + REVIEWS

The Weekend Australian, March 2025

Right now, we are up our to testicles in grapes. Vintage 2025 has started.

But we thought we would take a break to share with you a very lovely piece, penned by the erudite oracle Nick Ryan and published recently in the Weekend Australian Magazine.

“It might be the best Tassie riesling I’ve tasted”

Two years since Haddow + Dineen’s pinot noir grapes were devoured by a gaggle of geese, the winemaker has bounced back with a riesling masterclass.

Nick Haddow, cheesemaker, brewer, dairy farmer and perpetual motion machine for the promotion of a particularly Tasmanian way of looking at life, knew he’d end up in wine somehow. “I’d always been an interloper on the fringes of wine,” he says. “I had to dive in eventually.”

When he did, he was clever enough to push someone in with him. Jeremy Dineen was well established as one of Tasmania’s leading winemakers when they decided to stress-test their friendship by founding a wine business. The first releases under the Haddow + Dineen label sprang from the 2018 vintage and were born in Dineen’s coast-clinging vineyard near York Town, where the Tamar spills into the sea. The vineyard sits on uncommon soils, composed mainly of white quartzite gravels with small patches of orange clay. There’s little organic matter, and it retains water about as well as a tissue paper teapot. That vineyard’s modest 3ha, let alone its yield-limiting location and geology, meant that other fruit sources would be required.

“We won’t buy fruit in,” says Dineen of the plan they hatched. “We’ll only work with vineyards we can lease and manage ourselves.” One such Tamar Valley vineyard supplies shiraz (a minor Tasmanian variety) while another further south, near Sorell, adds another pinot noir to the stable as well as some scintillating riesling. Dineen knows the site well. He bears a scar from a picking mishap back in the 1990s when friends of his parents owned it. New owners saw accommodation potential and were keen on the property’s orchards, but didn’t know what to do with the vineyard – so Haddow and Dineen snapped up a long lease and set about reworking the place to their exacting standards. A flock of marauding geese devouring most of the pinot noir in 2024 was an inconvenient endorsement of their efforts.

The wines are distinctively Tasmanian, though not necessarily in the way we’ve come to expect. There’s a compelling off-kilter personality to them that speaks both to Haddow’s intention to “dabble where we can to provide a different narrative”, and to Dineen’s capacity to move the dial in intriguing directions.

Tickled… bloody… pink!

Haddow + Dineen started as a side hustle for us. It was a chance for us to collaborate on something stimulating and meaningful (and eventually, maybe profitable). But it has come to be something else as well: a manifestation of two mate’s values, thoughts and ideas of Tasmanian wine. Our expression of both site and variety is a personal one but, when it resonates with others, like you and like Nick Ryan, it is hard not to feel moved.

We sent Nick a text yesterday, thanking him for his kind words and support. He  immediately wrote back: “The wines do the heavy lifting, I just point them out.” This speaks volumes about the man and his motivation to connect singular wines to an audience of a similar bent - one which is driven to explore the margins in an effort to seek out the uncommon.

Therefore, to you, we also say a heartfelt THANK YOU. You are reading this because you have raised your hand and declared yourself a card-carrying member of that club. Putting our wine in bottles is self-indulgent and pointless unless people like you are prepared to then pour it into your glass.

So, for as long as it remains stimulating and meaningful (and eventually, maybe profitable), let’s keep doing this thing together.  

Will write again after vintage.

Best,

Nick + Jeremy

TASMANIAN WINE ONLINE - BY WINDSOR DOBBIN

Some lovely words last week by local writer of all things wine and travel, Windsor Dobbin.

Haddow & Dineen 2023 Grain of Truth Pinot Gris

Haddow & Dineen is the impressive collaboration between Tasmanian cheese guru and wine lover Nick Haddow and former Joseph Chromy winemaker Jeremy Dineen. The pair has a project underway to deliver a super-premium benchmark pinot gris down the track, but their current textural release from their Yorktown Vineyard delivers a lot of drinking pleasure. This is not a simple wine - as so many pinots gris are. Think hand-picking, whole bunch pressing, wild yeast and barrel fermentation. The end result is just a little funky, unfined, unfiltered and full of palate weight and density. Its richness and complexity make it very food friendly.