Wine & Spirits - February 2018 - 30

Clare and Keith Mugford
of Moss Wood

The original cabernet
sauvignon vines
Tom Cullity planted
in 1967 are still
producing today.

Cullity, who was out digging soil pits on the weekend wherever anyone would allow it, found a parcel near Caves Road in Wilyabrup, but the owner
wouldn't sell. He got an assist from the local GP,
Dr. Kevin Cullen, who was optimistic that vineyards
might jumpstart the economy and raise the land values in the area. The intransigent owner of the land
happened to work on Cullen's cattle ranch, and Cullen convinced him to trade the eight-acre parcel Cullity wanted for 16 acres of the Cullen ranch. Then
Cullen sold those eight acres to Cullity, who established Vasse Felix on the site.
Pannell found 26 acres just to the north of Cullity;
the Jupiters, Cullity's new neighbors, planted vines
on their ranch; and the Cullens eventually planted as
well, forming the early nexus of Wilyabrup cabernet
vineyards. The plant material came from Jack Mann
and his son, Dorham, who tended cabernet sauvignon at Houghton in the Swan River Valley, northeast of Perth. Fifty years on, successive generations
of those original selections have become a distinctive
asset of Margaret River cabernet.
MY FIRST INTRODUCTION TO THOSE VINES CAME IN
THE 1990S. Ted Schrauth had grown up in New England, married a doctor from Perth, and settled there,
exporting wines to the states and running fishing
expeditions with friends in the trade off Nantucket
Island. Fishing was fine, but it was the promise of diving for abalone off the Margaret River coast that convinced me to head to Western Australia. At six a.m.
one morning, Schrauth collected me and my duffel
from Leeuwin Estate and we headed to the beach. We

WINE & SPIRITS

FEBRUARY 2018

donned wetsuits in a parking lot by the rocky shore
and swam out to two massive underwater rock outcroppings, each forming the wall of a channel, where
the abalone attached themselves, fattening up on bits
of kelp ripped up by the waves. We had to battle the
same currents that were feeding the abalone, and my
haul was not quite up to Schrauth's. Too busy catching my breath, then swimming down and trying to
pry the creatures off the rocks, I didn't notice that I'd
scraped a gash in my ankle until toweling off.
Schrauth drove us to Moss Wood for first aid.
Inside the winery, a simple insulated steel structure
with a cavernous door on the west side, Keith Mugford was by the tanks, wrestling with some hoses
on the floor-which is pretty much the same place
I found him when I returned this past November,
except the hoses were attached to a mobile bottling
line that had backed up to the door.
Expressing some relief that he didn't need to bandage me up this time, Mugford led me out to the
vineyard, a sheltered hillside facing north, toward
the sun, and east, away from the wind. Within the
29 acres of vines, he still tends some of the original
vines the Pannell family planted in 1969. He's been
here since 1979, staying on with his wife, Clare, to
lease the property from the Pannells in 1984 and then
buy it a year later. The relatively warm, sheltered site
ripens cabernet more reliably than a parcel the Mugfords purchased one mile south. "When we bought
Ribbon Vale in 2000, the tannins in the cabernet were
often hard," Clare told me as we drove to see it. The
parcel is a long, narrow strip of vineyards with a grove
of trees in the middle, which they planted to alleviate

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - February 2018