This is the contentious story of how craft beer forced its way into a premium wine hotspot in Western Australia — and the Kiwi brewing engineer at the centre of it all. What happened in Margaret River, 270km south of Perth, was a stand-off between winemakers and brewers that ultimately became litigious, embroiling lawyers and local bureaucrats in a fight over beer yeast, wine tourism, and the region’s identity as a playground for the upper-middle class.
Margaret River was perhaps the most glittering ultra-premium wine region in Australia at the outset of the 21st century. Here, the emphasis has always been placed on quality over quantity.
And today the region’s leading producers continue to pride themselves on this image. They make no cheap shiraz, eschew the temptation to sell second-rate cleanskins, and forever emphasise boutique over bulk. Cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay are the region’s money-makers, with wines made from these grapes often successfully marketed at prices two and sometimes three times higher than the average premium wines bottled in Australia.
Margaret River evolved into a special kind of wine tourism destination as a result of this reputation. Yes, it’s a beautiful place but a lot of wine regions are spectacular too. What stands Margaret River apart from the rest of Australia is simple: the region has long been able to attract the kind of consumers who are unafraid of blowing $100 a pop on wine.
For a long time, however, it has also been a region long noteworthy for its absence of proper pubs or breweries.
Only at the turn of the millennium did a few microbreweries begin to pop up around the place to service a growing market for beer. Bootleg Brewery was the first to open in 1994. Wicked Ale Brewery opened up in 1998 (later becoming Bush Shack Brewery). Cowaramup Brewing Company followed in 2002, Colonial Brewing in 2004 and Duckstein Brewery in 2009.
By 2010, there were just over a handful of places for drinkers to be served a taste of local beer, but this achievement should be put into perspective: at the same time, there were over 70 cellar doors in Margaret River to visit for a taste of local wine.
Some of the wineries began to take notice of the beer fad and detected an opportunity. A handful of them cautiously began to sell beer at their cellar doors (or, as in the case of Saracens Estates, incorporate the “brewery door” of Duckstein into the same space). Many vignerons sensed it wouldn’t be long before some of these new microbreweries, as rival destination venues, were competing for the same customer base of couples, groups of young people, and families, mostly from Perth, that the cellar doors had tied up.
Margaret River’s vignerons could either get behind the trend or stand in front of it.
When a new brewery, the Eagle Bay Brewing Company, opened its doors in Yallingup just 1km away from Wise Wines, the vigneron Ron Wise did not put up a fight. And maybe this is because he understood that, as millionaire-vigneron of the northern-most winery in Margaret River, his business was likely to benefit from some additional traffic on Eagle Bay Road. Maybe it might also have been that, as someone who had only been in the region since 1992, it did not come naturally for him to resent the arrival of newcomers in 2010 — not least when the ‘newcomers’ in this case were members of the d’Espeissis family who had been farming around Eagle Bay for decades before Wise became a vigneron.
Down Caves Road (the main artery of Margaret River) and into Wilyabrup (rightly or wrongly considered to be the viticultural heart of the region), very different dynamics played out in 2010.
Murray Burton was an accountant and wine entrepreneur who had been involved in the Western Australian viticultural scene since the 1990s. After his plans to take over a beleaguered Margaret River wine label fell apart in 2007, Burton changed tack and decided that the best way for him to get a footing in the region was to open a new brewery rather than take over an existing winery. In the middle months of 2009, he registered his own company, Wiseowl Investments Pty Ltd, after the possibility arose to acquire a hallowed stretch of Wilyabrup with a few young vines on it and some Caves Road frontage.
This was described as Lot 100.
After Wiseowl acquired the property, Burton looked across the ditch for inspiration. He hired Chris Little to help him realise his dream of making beer in wine country. Little was “the master craft brewery engineer” behind CLE Brew Systems, a Nelson-based outfit that had been in the business of manufacturing, designing, and installing microbreweries since the early 1990s. Before this, Little had built up more than a decade of technical experience at Mac’s: he had been there from its beginnings in Stoke way back in 1981.
The adjoining property to Lot 100 on Caves Road was registered to Cullen Wines Pty Ltd. Cullen was one of the most revered of the ultra-premium labels in Margaret River. Inheriting the family vineyard and winery, and taking the reins from her mother, Vanya Cullen became one of the first vignerons in the region to embrace organic viticulture. Within a few years of doing that, she then decided to go the whole hog and get behind biodynamic principles. While this approach is now in vogue — even hallowed — it certainly wasn’t when Vanya Cullen first adopted it. But she stuck to her guns. And as a winemaker, she produced some terrific cabernets, especially at the end of warmer vintages. By the end of the 2000s, she had slotted into the role of Margaret River matriarch. “Her zeal, imagination, intellectual response, and appreciation of nature advanced Margaret River’s fine-wine agenda profoundly during the 2000s,” wrote Andrew Caillard in The Australian Ark. “And her success propelled her forward as the most famous woman to date in Australian wine”.
Objections to airborne yeast
In October 2009, Burton applied to the Shire of Busselton (the local council) to develop a new cellar door, restaurant, and microbrewery at Lot 100. The council publicised the development proposal and resolved to decide on the application in six months. When a few letters of opposition came in, many were from the same correspondent. In addition to a letter of objection written by Vanya Cullen in her own hand, another letter was sent in from a development consultant who had been commissioned by Cullen Wines. A few weeks later Cullen delivered a small petition carrying nine signatures (mostly winemakers, some wine writers, and a brewer — along with the name “Vanya Cullen”, of course).
Cullen was convinced that beer yeast would atmospherically migrate into her vineyards and affect the indigenous yeast population. Wild fermentation was coming into vogue, in a way that was harmonious and complementary with biodynamic viticulture. If the atmosphere was compromised, Cullen alleged, it might jeopardise the fermentation process and even change the flavour of her wines.
But there was more to Cullen’s crusade than a spurious claim about spores. Her underlying concern was about the whole point of Margaret River. She had a vendetta against beer. For Cullen, the arrival of breweries had been an “unfortunate” development. They should be set far away from the vineyards and wineries of the region, she believed. “You would not see breweries in the middle of Burgundy or Bordeaux,” she told Decanter. “It’s a dilution of the wine industry, which the Margaret River region is known for internationally, and it is not seen favourably.”
The main thing to acknowledge in the dispute that followed between Burton and Cullen is the one-sided nature of the support shown by the Shire of Busselton for Cullen right from the start. After the council’s dedicated planning review officer uncontroversially approved Wiseowl’s development application, the council took the unusual step of voting down the report. The main reason given for this was because “the micro-brewery may jeopardise the agricultural use of adjoining land and the landscape values of the site”. In addition, the council admitted that the proposed development would contravene local planning regulations (in particular, their vague strictures about zoning for “viticulture and tourism”).
Burton was given no right to challenge Cullen’s claims about the dangers of atmospheric beer yeast. And he was justifiably confused by a decision that had been reached through the application of rules and considerations that had not been applied to other microbreweries in the region.
It all seemed arbitrary. And all Burton could do was appeal to the State Administrative Tribunal.
At first, the tribunal refused to intervene beyond hosting a mediation session between Cullen and Burton in April 2010. This experiment did nothing to disabuse the council of its bias towards the Cullen side of the argument: for when, in its aftermath, the Shire of Busselton was delivered a report from Professor Graham Fleet (the expert whom Cullen had engaged), a selective reading of this report would then inform the revised decision of the council to approve the development of a cellar door and restaurant at Lot 100, but not a microbrewery. Beer was still banned.
Once again, it was the apparent arbitrariness of this decision that led Burton back to the State Administrative Tribunal. After a few months of procedural uncertainty, the tribunal finally invited Wiseowl and the Shire to prepare arguments supported by their own expert witnesses and bring all of this evidence to a new hearing, on September 28-29.
The council instructed its solicitors, McLeods, to prepare a case that doubled down on its original reasoning for overturning the finding of the planning officer who approved Wiseowl’s initial application. But the key mistake they made was their decision to depend upon the expert evidence of the same biologist who had originally been commissioned by Cullen Wines to draw up a report for the council. And this is because the testimony of Professor Fleet went little further than an admission that he did not know how the yeast would be contained to the site of the brewery.
For her part, Cullen reiterated her concerns for the tribunal that “yeast cells from the proposed brewery will inevitably travel into the surrounding environment and will sexually reproduce with the yeasts on our vineyard site […] which will in turn lead to beerlike flavours in our wines and also stuck fermentations.”
The onus was placed upon Wiseowl’s lawyers, Freehills, to prove the brewery’s yeast containment plan was sound.
Little’s decision-turning evidence
New Zealander Little was introduced to the West Australian administrative court as an expert with decades of experience in the brewing industry, specifically, in the design and installation of brewery systems. And every one of his systems, just like his design for Wiseowl, was a “contained, sterile, and hygienic” brewery. A number of these were successfully installed, the tribunal was assured, “adjacent to wineries [and] there has never been any issues, with brewer’s yeast or any yeast, migrating and impacting on production and quality of their products”.
Furthermore, not only would Little clarify that brewing yeast was always more vulnerable to indigenous yeasts in the pre-fermentation stage (and not the other way around, as per the Cullen theory), but he would also reiterate that a holding tank at 85 degrees centigrade would be effective at destroying all brewing yeast at the post-fermentation stage.
Two additional independent experts in brewing science and yeasts, a chemist and a microbiologist, confirmed that there was no solid evidence to suggest that any yeast migration would occur from the proposed brewery into nearby vineyards.
With that settled, it remained only for the tribunal to find that the microbrewery was indeed consistent with the objectives of the “viticulture and tourism zone”, along with the other planning regulation as “the microbrewery is a tourist facility of a scale and nature appropriate in a rural setting”.
And, with that, Burton got the nod to make Wiseowl Investments the vehicle for his brand new Cheeky Monkey Brewing Company in Wilyabrup.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Around February 2012, Cullen made a last-ditch attempt to stop the brewpub going ahead when she gathered up a handful of neighbouring vignerons to oppose Cheeky Monkey’s application for a liquor licence. She had failed to stop Murray Burton from brewing beer, but maybe she would succeed in stopping him from selling any of it.
Barry Sargeant, the director of liquor licensing, dismissed Cullen’s claim that a licence was not in the “public interest” due to … escaping beer yeast.
There can be no questioning the extent to which Vanya Cullen truly believed that the biodynamic principles upon which her vineyard operated, along with the system of wild fermentation that she sometimes used in the winery, were both imperiled as a result of what she understood to be the propensity of yeast spores to jump over the fence and root some of the locals.
It is also easy to grasp why eight or nine of Cullen’s neighbouring vignerons had been so willing to sign their names to a petition framed by the matriarch of Margaret River.
The whole saga is important above all for illustrating the role played by microbreweries in what was happening to Margaret River in this window.
The place remained known for producing serious wines. It was also renowned — even envied — across Australia for attracting some serious wine drinkers. But now there was some beer around the place. A different kind of boozing clientele began to visit the region. And there was no turning back.
It was the chief executive at Sandalford Wines, Grant Brinklow, who summed it all up best.
Reflecting on the feud between Cullen and Burton, Brinklow explained to The West Australian in 2013 that the anxiety felt by many in the region was not about “breweries … overshadowing wineries”. Festering beneath these jealousies was instead a concern that the region was on its way to becoming a haven for visiting groups of grown-ups on drinking rampages (the people he calls the “adult schoolies”).
Burton would explain the Cheeky Monkey business model a little differently to James Atkinson for The Shout in 2012. “What we are trying to do is focus more on the entertainment that’s available for young to middle-aged people with children. [W]e tailored the way we designed the building and everything around that particular age group — that’s our focus”. As Atkinson qualifies, “this demographic of visitors to Margaret River is not particularly interested in visiting wineries to taste and purchase wine to take it away”.
Burton again: “They’re often interested in the nice surroundings — having a couple of drinks and watching the kids play on the playground.”
It was this model that made Cheeky Monkey Brewing Company so attractive to tourists and locals alike. Following the opening of the Caves Road brewpub in autumn of 2012, Cheeky Monkey went onto open a number of other sites. It has expanded its production and canning capacities. Today it is a formidable player in the Western Australian beer industry.
And there was no beer yeast Armageddon or Brettanomyces apocalypse in Margaret River.
All these breweries did was make the dozens of wineries there confront what had hitherto been a whopping black hole in their business plans: that, up to the 2010s, they had been nowhere near as motivated as they could have been to take money specifically from Australian men who had become genetically conditioned over the past century to drink beer, rather than wine, on social occasions.
All they needed was a Kiwi to show them.
But not everyone has been so easily convinced.
Today, the Cullen cellar door and restaurant remains one of the few licensed venues in Margaret River not to offer beer.
This article is a highly abridged version of a complex and sinewy dispute in the area of administrative law between Vanya Cullen and Murray Burton – and for anyone interested in the finer legal and bureaucratic details of this dispute, they should search out for my forthcoming book, provisionally titled “Doctors and Millionaires: Wine, Money, and Glory in Margaret River“.