Observers of 22-year-old Bruce Tyrrell at UNE 50 years ago would have recognised something of the successful winemaker and promoter he was to become.
There was the seemingly endless supply of top-notch family plonk he subtly marketed at Earle Page College formal dinners each week, initiating many to wine drinking. “They still blame me for that today,” Bruce says. But it was in the beer department that his head for figures and business acumen really came to the fore, as college treasurer.
“I paid for my third-year fees sly-grogging beer to about 500 thirsty blokes in college,” Bruce admits now, with the impunity of time. “I got hold of the bloke who ran the Citizen Military Forces (CMF) mess and the army, in those days, bought all its beer tax-free, so it was about 30-40% off retail. So we did a deal and he made some money, the college made some money and I made a reasonable profit. You should never miss an opportunity.”
With one of former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s chief advisors – the late Professor Geoff Meredith – as his main business management lecturer, Bruce was schooled in more than creative accounting. “He taught us how to run a business, not to be a bean counter, and there are things that I learnt about stock valuation and how to think that I still apply in business today.
“It was the four best years of my life at UNE. I had a ball, but I also learnt a lot about how to organise my mind and prioritise my time. I think I got First Class Honours in rugby, and coaching rugby league at Earle Page also taught me leadership skills.”
Returning to the family’s Hunter Valley operation with a Bachelor of Agricultural Economics, the first in his family to attend university, Bruce hit the ground running under the watchful eye of his father Murray.
“Our industry was growing rapidly,” Bruce remembers. “The business advice I was given was simply to go out and sell, and that’s what I did. I remember being thrown out of Sherry-Lehmann (the top wine and liquor store) in New York in the early 1980s, and the second time I visited the owner pulled a 45 revolver on me. It was a pretty tough market. Australia’s biggest selling product at the time was Blackberry Nip. That’s what we drank. We were just trying to get people to drink wine.”
It’s a different story today. The family business English settler Edward Tyrrell established in the Hunter Valley in 1858 – which boasts the oldest producing vineyard in NSW – is the world’s foremost semillon producer. Bruce has only recently handed over the reins to his son Chris, making him just the fifth leader in the family’s history.
The Tyrrell’s Semillon Vat 1 that Bruce developed and nurtured is considered one of the world’s finest wines and is certainly Australia’s most awarded white wine, having been awarded almost 5,500 medals and more than 330 trophies. The Tyrrell’s Sacred Sites range – wines made only with grapes from Hunter Valley vines more than 100 years old and still growing on their own roots – bottles Bruce’s passion for provenance.
“The oldest vineyards in the world are here in Australia, which really upsets the French,” he says. “I started in the ’80s, going around the district, finding the best blocks of vineyard and buying them or leasing them or purchasing their grapes – doing whatever I could to get my hands on the best grapes in the valley – and I’ve probably got three-quarters of those vineyards now. It was something that no-one else had.”
His tertiary qualifications were also something that few winemakers possessed at the time.
“But I still see myself as a farmer; nature determines what’s going to happen, we don’t decide,” Bruce says. “However, ours is one of the few industries where we are totally integrated; we grow our own grapes and go right through to wholesale and retail,” Bruce says. “Each stage has its challenges, particularly selling wine at the moment. No-one knows what the market’s doing.”
Chinese buyers are, thankfully, returning, following the lifting of heavy tariffs on Australian wine worth an estimated $1 billion annually. Total wine exports account for roughly 45% of what we produce. “During the time we were kicked out of China we opened another six or seven markets, none of them big enough to replace China but we just had to keep working to get that business back,” Bruce says.
There are climatic challenges on the horizon, too, but that’s where the magic of wine production comes in. “Some years are good and some years are bad and you have to learn to appreciate the two, as well as what you’ve got to do,” Bruce says. “Without variation, it would be easy and all the wines would taste the same.
“We are already adapting to climatic change, pruning differently and spraying sunscreen on the vines; we’ve changed our machinery, and we formed an environmental management committee back in 2009 to reduce our power and fuel usage. It’s getting harder, but we continue to look at how we can grow better grapes and save money.”
And it’s time, Bruce says, for him to “step back and shut up”. “I have two grandsons and want to help bring them up and teach them the values of the family. To be fair dinkum; to deal with people fairly and reasonably and consider your impact on their lives. We want to make great wine, make no mistake. But we want to be for real, in everything we do.”
