Stefano Lubiana, or Steve, is not keen on entering his wines in shows. The subtle and elegant wines that come from Tasmania’s cooler climate and long ripening tend to get lost in a line-up of hundreds of wines, where the big, assertive wines bully for attention. “Also, I make my wines for drinking with food – not in a sterile room by a lot of serious people in white lab coats,” he says.
His riesling and sauvignon aside, Steve’s wines are not so strong on fruit flavour. Instead, he goes for complexity, a wine that keeps you intrigued. Instead of the show circuit, Steve sends bottles to wine writers and has glowing testimonials from them, rather than medals to attest to his skills.
“There are no real tricks to making any wine,” he says. “You just have to trust your own palate; it’s having confidence in yourself. I make wines I like to drink. It’s like an artist, if you paint in a certain style because it’s trendy, you’ve lost the plot. You make what you like and hope someone else will like it too and buy it.”
Steve was born in Melbourne to Italian parents of a family that had “been making wine for as long as they could remember” and they could remember back 200 years. He absorbed grape-growing and wine-making on his parents’ vineyards in the Riverlands and Barossa Valley in South Australia, did formal studies at an agricultural college in Adelaide and spent time working in Champagne and Tuscany “learning by tasting and watching”.
Steve and Monique Lubiana came to Tasmania on their honeymoon in 1987 and he was struck by “the intensity of the flavours, not just the wine, but the milk, the strawberries, the meat, and I thought ‘this is it’.” The decision to start their own vineyard here was not made on impulse however. Steve drove around Margaret River, wine areas of South Australia as well as Tasmania, and studied aerial maps of each region.
A plot of poor gravelly soil “just what you look for in a grape site” in a very warm spot at Granton was chosen. The Lubianas have 140 hectares there and now there is 18ha planted with grape vines, predominately pinot noir and chardonnay, but also sauvignon blanc, riesling, pinot grigio and merlot.
The first commercial crop was about 25 tonnes; this year’s was 130 tonnes. At first, Steve made wines for other growers, but two years ago, when his own grape yield had increased, he stopped making wines under contract. “I did it to get going and get some cash,” he said. “But money does not drive me, I’d rather spend time with my kids.”
Steve and Monique’s children are aged 8, 10 and 12, and Steve says once they leave home, he might put in another 20ha of vines. There will never be so many vines that he cannot manage the vineyard himself.
“I want to stay small and focused,” he said. “If the winemaker has too much to look after, he has to delegate and there goes that control.”
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