Graeme Leith has been the winemaker since the first vintage, now lost in the mists of time yet a bottle still remains with ’79 chenin blanc winemakers Graeme and Sebastian Leith on the label.

Graeme first became acquainted with wine as did so many other Melbournians with the odd bottle of Rutherglen red purchased from Jimmy Watson’s in Lygon St Carlton. But he really became fascinated by the product of the grape in Perugia, in 1960, where he was attending the university for foreigners doing a three month course in Italian language.

Every Thursday evening he and his friends would eat at a little trattoria, the food was good and the wine was sublime; but one night the wine was very ordinary. Where’s the good wine, they asked, to be told that the barrel had run out, this wine was from the vineyard next door. How could they be so different?

A short trip on the Lambretta established that it was so: neighbouring vineyards, one producing good wine, and one bad.

The question was why? and so the first seed was sown, and the first step of a journey into the alchemy of wine; turning bunches of grapes into that magical, constantly changing and always fascinating beverage, wine.

Work and children occupied the next twenty years and only one batch of wine was made in that time, fortunately.

But when the chance came he and partner Sue Mackinnon seized it, planted their vines at Kingower, and the journey continued in earnest. They complemented their winemaking with the growing of organic vegetables. Their intention was to make a shiraz cabernet blend, with as little chemical input as possible, along with a few small batches of whites. Working for a vintage at the Laira vineyard at Coonawarra convinced Graeme that good fruit goes obligingly through the process of turning itself into wine; all you’ve got to do is hold its hand.

The first wine, a glorious concentrated red had too little chemical input, no sulphur was added as a preservative and the wine had a very short life span. From then on all wines have had minimal sulphur additions to keep them alive and well, as Graeme accepted that the Romans had it right two thousand years ago when they burned sulphur in their amphorae. Unirrigated, ripe fruit, traditional methods of hand plunging in small stainless steel fermenters and hand presses cranking down the ‘cake’ late into the night was the formula for the next twenty years and many superb wines were produced.

Some more sophisticated wine making equipment has been added over the last ten years or so, including an air bag press, and we know we’re making wines as good as, or better than out 1982 shiraz cabernet, the first wine we showed, our first gold medal, and a wine that is still alive though wearying after 25 years.

Graeme has always enjoyed the challenge of different styles, different varieties, and so we have The Angel cabernet, three different shirazes, cabernet franc, grenache, Graeme’s Blend shiraz cabernet, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc  and lately the highly regarded pinot noir we make from Coldstream fruit. We also make the highly acclaimed Three Wise Men pinot at Kingower from fruit transported from Narre Warren East.

Generally speaking the best wines over the years have been made in dry seasons, the wetter seasons have produced weedier wines; but we haven’t had a wet year for a long, long time.

All of our reds are of exemplary quality and have the power to age gracefully plus something special no other Bendigo district wines seem to have. According to many people that something distinguishes Passing Clouds from other Bendigo wines: there is a fleshy full bodied weight, an opulence and plushness that makes many other Bendigo reds skeletal in comparison.

Graeme sometimes says that making wine is not all that dissimilar to making a fruit cake; ‘good ingredients, a guiding hand, and get the timing right!’

He also says that making wine is 20% winemaking and 80% cleaning up.

Graeme is now passing the wine making baton onto his son Cameron and we expect this quality and individuality will be maintained if not improved upon.