Moss Wood – Fergal Gleeson, “Team Spirits”, Margaret River Region Magazine Autumn 2017
One of the founding estates of the Margaret River region, Moss Wood is still leading from the front with the release of their first cabernet Vintage. Fergal Gleeson speaks to owners Clare and Keith Mugford.
Planted in 1969 Moss Wood is an important, founding estate of the Margaret River wine region, located in the northern sub-region of Wilyabrup, Western Australia. Clare and Keith Mugford, as winemakers, viticulturalists and proprietors, have been making wine and tending the vineyard at Moss Wood since 1984 and 1979, respectively. Their exacting viticulture ensures the production of grapes of excellent quality-and they have created a stable of fine wines distinguished by their consistency over each vintage and their ability to age superbly.
FOUNDING ESTATE
For the past 40 years Moss Wood in Wilyabrup has witnessed the amazing success story that winemaking in the Margaret River region has become. Owners Clare and Keith Mugford (above) are making consistently excellent wine, including their 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon.
Margaret River has changed a lot since 1973, the year of the first cabernet Vintage.
Back then it was dairy country. Winding the clock back further to the turn of the 20th century, Margaret River was a getaway spot for honeymooners. So when the winemaking pioneers arrived in the early 1970s there was no tradition to draw on, no infrastructure in the area. They had to solve problems for themselves. Owners of Moss Wood Claire Mugford and husband Keith recall the early days at the winery when everything came in and out on the back of a ute, winemaking equipment was adapted from agricultural machinery and anything that couldn’t be adapted had to be shipped in on the train from Busselton. Sort of like a West Australian version of the Alan Rickman movie Bottle Shock will paint the picture.
Jump forward 40 years and Moss Wood are on top of their game. They hold a Red five-star rating from Halliday. The entire suite of wines scored 94 or higher in the recent Halliday Wine Companion 2017 and they hold a Langton’s rating of” exceptional”, which is the highest accolade available. Bandying words like terroir around might have raised eyebrows 40 years ago, but while they didn’t use the T-word back then, Keith had a notion that the importance of vineyards might be the most critical thing – and 40 years later that’s been confirmed absolutely.
Keith is keen not to overstate the role of the winemaker. ”The style is dictated by the vineyard and the vintage conditions.You can fiddle around in the background fine-tuning with different types of oak or harvest points, but the natural influences play a much stronger role than the man-made. What you see in the Moss Wood wine every year is the best that that particular season offered from that vineyard.” Moss Wood is still best known for cabernet but they bring the same attention to detail and skill to all their wines, which include chardonnay, a semillon sauvignon blanc, a straight semillon, a seriously impressive merlot and pinot noir.
Keith, in the classic Australian understated style, says that they’ve had luck along the way, but perhaps he’s being modest. More accurately, Claire attributes working with good people and remaining focused on the integrity of the wines as their key to success. The future involves getting their children in involved in Moss Wood. Keith has a chuckle about nowadays having sotne extra opinions on how things should be done. He reckons that, as a region, Margaret River has done very well in the first 50 years but the profile globally is still patchy. In the UK they’ve been selling Moss Wood since 1984 and are well placed and have a strong position.
But in the US they’ve had some false starts.
”In Manhattan there are lots of restaurants that could offer a bottle of Moss Wood but they feel they’ve still got a way to go to convince consumers that if they spend their money on a Margaret River wine that they’ll get as good an experience as with a Barolo or Burgundy,” he says. Hemingway wrote 4 7 endings for one of
his novels. Monet did hundreds of paintings of haystacks. When you talk to the Mugfords you see that same never-ending drive for refinements in what they do. Keith would describe that as just “keep on keeping on” but that disguises the serious intent to make the best possible wine that they can Vintage after Vintage.
That’s in the Moss Wood DNA.