Haddow & Dineen
Haddow & Dineen is a collaborative Tasmanian small batch wine project from cheesemaker Nick Haddow and winemaker Jeremy Dineen. What started as an idea for the two mates to make some small parcels of wine together has now become quite the newsworthy journey. And it’s no surprise when you look at who the mates are.
Nick Haddow founded Bruny Island Cheese Co in 2003 to explore his interests in cheese. The Bruny Island Brewery and Glen Huon Dairy Co followed in 2016 & 2017 respectively. 2017 was the first year Nick made some wine with Tasmanian wine industry stalwart Jeremy Dineen.
Jeremy ran the winemaking team at Josef Chromy from 2005. A dozen years into the role, he fell for a site in Yorktown, near the mouth of the Tamar River in Tasmania’s north. It didn’t take much for him to convince Nick to make a couple of wines together. Enjoying the partnership, Jeremy saw it was a good time to do his own thing and partnered with Nick to form Haddow & Dineen. The two have just taken the significant step of buying the Yorktown Vineyard and another site near Sorell, NE of Hobart, from which we will see some Riesling from 2021 come in next year.
The 2019s & 2020s are entirely from the Yorktown Vineyard in the Tamar Valley. The three-hectare vineyard is uniquely situated on white quartzite gravel with patches of orange clay. It was first planted to Pinot Noir in 1998 with Pinot Gris added in 2005.
The winemaking is as philosophically edifying as it could be: no additions except minimal doses of SO2; no fining or filtration; and the barrels are bottled as a whole with no blending. The wines show purity, depth, texture and terroir. These are wines of great control and consideration.