In conversation with: Ken Helm
8 min read.
In producing Ancient Country, Inspired Wines, the mini documentary on the Canberra District wine region, Emma sat down with some of Canberra's leading lights to talk wine, winemaking, riesling and shiraz in this region. Here is an extract from her conversation with Ken Helm of Helm Wines.
Emma: Ken, how did you get into wine?
Ken: Well I had a background in grape growing and wine making. My great-great grandparents arrived in Australia in the 1850s and they settled in Albury and Rutherglen, so I’m the fifth generation. So it fell out of the family with my father’s time and I ended up as an insectocologist for the CSIRO. I arrived in Canberra, I met all these very interesting people who loved the classics, loved food, loved wine, and of course three of us from CSIRO ended up coming and growing grapes. I was fortunate that I had a background in grape growing as a child in Albury and Rutherglen, and I saw this area as having potential because of its location – close to Canberra, a population centre, people who were also cultured and had a very keen interest in wine and food.
Image: Ken with the historic - and still in use! - cabernet press.
Emma: What drew you to Riesling specifically?
Ken: Well, this being a cool area for grape growing, and particularly in the ‘70s they thought that the only places you could grow grapes were either in the Hunter Valley, the Barossa Valley or out at Griffith – it had to be warm. One of the cooler areas they talked about was Mudgee, and so for us to even dare to think that we could grow grapes around Canberra was something which they thought we were all mad. So I looked at it, and being from a German background, having come from Rutherglen which is quite a warm area, I thought we needed to look for some cool climate varieties. So cabernet and Riesling were the two varieties which I chose and was encouraged to by the NSW Department of Agriculture and their viticultural section.
Emma: Since you chose those varieties and planted them in your vineyard, how many vintages have you been making wine here?
Ken: Well this is the one we’ve just completed, our 2021 vintage was my 45th vintage. So yes, I’ve seen a lot of vintages but still with Riesling it’s a very demanding mistress. If you make one mistake, she never forgives you. So every year is different because Rieslings are made in the vineyard. My job as a winemaker is I’m the custodian of the fruit. And it’s up to me, basically, to not mess up what the vineyard has done. So the vineyard is very important to us – location, how the vineyard is orientated to the sun, how the grapes are growing, what are the yields, what the particular season does to it, is there a lot of rain, not enough rain – all those sorts of things are all taken into consideration so then I have to choose the right time to pick the grapes – not too early and not too late – and then take them to the winery. I decided to build a specialist, state of the art winery so that the chances of causing errors or making mistakes with that wonderful fruit were reduced in that specialist winery.
Emma: That’s a great lead in to how you make Riesling. What are the techniques and the practices that you use to make a cool climate Canberra Riesling?
Image: The Helm family ringing the bell to mark the start of vintage.
Ken: As I say, Riesling is a variety that is very rewarding but you do have to have always in mind that the fruit is the most important thing – how and when you pick them. So we do a lot of testing of the grapes in the vineyard, basically every 2-3 days as we get closer and closer to harvest, and we’re looking for fruit flavour, we’re looking for balance. I spend a lot of time in Germany looking at Rieslings as well and the Germans always say to me, ‘Herr Helm, it’s balance, balance Herr Helm’. It’s all about the balance in the grape and then, in the resultant wine.
So I bring the grapes into the winery, I’m particularly aware that I want to make a very fresh, clean wine, which reflects what has happened in the vineyard, so we take them through this process of crushing them as cool as we possibly can, reducing any chance of any oxidation in the juice and when I saw oxidation I mean like when you cut an apple and it goes brown – that’s oxidising. Grape juice will do the same. So we’re very aware that we keep air away once we’ve crushed the grapes and we take them through this, well, basically a recipe that I’ve developed over the last 45 years, of fermenting the wine through a controlled temperature, making sure that there is no off flavours developing and then bottling the wine as quickly as we can so we capture those lovely fresh characters in the bottle. And that’s basically like capturing a genie in a bottle.
There is a process refinement, but I started making wine when places like Charles Sturt University Wine Science Degree was only just starting with Brian Croser and I was over there in the early days, so in those days there was no such thing as cultured yeasts. These days we can buy all these cultured yeasts which have particular attributes. Those days that wasn’t available, you know, and I was literally culturing my own yeasts in those days - at CSIRO in my lunchtime of course, and I was using the microbiologists and biochemists at CSIRO to give me advice on how we cultured yeasts and how wines could be fermented and what were the aspects.
So, I grew up over the last 45 years with a very rapidly developing wine science discipline, and continually new ideas were coming out. We used to cold settle all our juice so that we got clean juice prior to fermentation, that would take 3-4 days. We’ve adopted in the last four years flotation, which is a new technique which you can do in an hour and a half, two hours what takes four or five days, and so those techniques we’ve adopted and embraced. There’s others I’ve looked at where they talk about doing oak maturation of Rieslings and also doing things like skin contact and that sort of thing – I’ve rejected those, they’re not the system I would like to use. I want the clean, fresh wine. So, I’ve adopted some and embraced them, others I’ve looked at and thought, ‘nup, that’s not for me’.
Emma: Not your style, definitely, and not what you’re known for at all. What are three words you would use to describe Canberra district Riesling?
Ken: Well it’s very difficult to use just three words. I would say that that Canberra District Rieslings make your senses soar. If you had to use three words I probably could get down to Riesling, the great wine of the world and it makes your senses soar, and I think that’s really what Riesling’s all about. Riesling makes your senses soar.
Emma: Perfect, thank you for that. Just to follow up on that, one of the things I’m really curious about is, kind of describing… so I’m going to float an idea with you and just see how you respond. I’ve been trying to test how Canberra Rieslings differ from other regions around Australia. And for me what I’ve been discovering is when you’re thinking about the Clare, or even the Eden Valley a little bit, they’re soft and floral and mineral, and for me in the Canberra Rieslings I get lovely floral elements but a real intensity as well. Is that true in your experience because you’ve had far more experience in Riesling than me.
Image: The 'grandfather' vines at the Helm vineyard.
Ken: Every wine region is unique when it produces Riesling, and at the International Riesling Challenge we judge on regionality, and that comes through very strongly. I see the Clare as you’ve described, as [having] its particular unique attributes and the Eden Valley. Canberra is unique and I think the only place that comes close to this freshness and crispness and intense fruit characters that we get is the Great Southern Area of Western Australia, down around Mt Barker and those places. But we still are unique and it is because of Canberra’s unique climate.
Canberra has more sunshine than any other capital except Perth, we have this wonderful sea breeze we call Bateman’s breath which comes in in summer, so we have cool nights or cool evenings followed by warm, hot, dry days. It’s a unique climate that you see very rarely in anywhere else in Australia. And when you look at the world, to have that differentiation between cool nights and warm, hot, dry days is what the great wine growing regions of the world are – Bordeaux in particular. You look at that and that’s where you see it.
Emma: I love Bateman’s Breath, I haven’t heard that one before. You mentioned the International Riesling Challenge, so you established that challenge, I think?
Ken: That’s correct.
Emma: Why Riesling and why Canberra?
Ken: Well I was growing Riesling and I was passionate about it and I had a lot of friends in the industry who were passionate about it, but prior to 2000 the word Riesling was being bastardised by the wine industry and they could make a Riesling out of sultanas or gordos or any white grape and they could call it Riesling! And so the true Riesling makers found it very hard to get any kind of purchase in the commercial area, and of course chardonnay was taking over. Then the Federal Government under lobbying from people like ourselves changed it. The word Riesling was quarantined only to be used on a bottle or on a bag or a box or any other commercialising of the word had to be made from the Riesling grape. So that’s changed everything. And I’ve always believed that timing is one of the most important things in anything in life and I thought, this is an opportunity for us to promote Riesling.
So I came up with the idea of having a Riesling Challenge. I spoke to a number of people in the show areas in Canberra and they weren’t that interested, I was fortunate [that] I gathered together a number of people, business people in Canberra, who liked the idea and also at the time the Chief Minister of the ACT Kate Carnell, she was very, very supportive of it, and I rang up my old friend Wolf Blass and he thought it was a great idea and so the whole thing started. We thought, well, it’ll be a bit of a promotion of Riesling in Australia and then I got the idea about making it international and look where it is now – the biggest event of its type in the southern hemisphere and actually in the world. It really has focused Riesling as a very important wine style, but more so it is in focus that Canberra Rieslings are up there with the best.
In the early days it wasn’t. The local product wasn’t looked at as being of the same sort of value as something from the Barossa or Clare or the Hunter or anywhere. And we also had a lot of problems selling in places like Sydney. People would taste your wine and they would say ‘oh that’s good, where’s that from?’, ‘Canberra’, ‘Well that can’t be good, nothing bloody good ever came out of Canberra’. So that was a difficulty, but in the last, say, 20 years, Canberra restauranteurs, particularly, have warmed to the wine because people have come from outside and said ‘why haven’t you got Canberra wine on the list?’ and that’s really the thing that’s boosted it.
But also, Canberra wines, because of what people like Tim has done with shiraz and I’ve done with Riesling have become a bit of a catch-cry across the whole of Australia. So you go to Sydney these days and you walk into a restaurant and say ‘I want to show you some wines’ and they’ll say ‘oh look we haven’t got time today, where are you from?’, ‘Canberra’, ‘Oh! We’ll have a look at your wines’. Canberra is definitely up there as a go-to wine by sommeliers these days, which is a very good thing for Canberra, not only as a wine producing area but as a tourist destination as well. It draws people here.
Emma: What do you love about the Canberra region landscape?
Ken: It’s a beautiful area. I like Canberra because I grew up in a place where we have a change of climate. I could never live in an area where you couldn’t look forward to winter when you’re in the heat of summer and you couldn’t look forward to summer when you’re in the freezing cold of winter. And so the change of seasons is beautiful. The wonderful light, the golden light that we get here is unique to anywhere in the world. I tried to capture it on my label, but the light is so hard to capture even in a photograph, it’s very hard to capture and print. So that’s one of the wonderful things, to sit of an evening and have that golden light come across. The beautiful, as I say, cool nights, the warm, hot dry days. It’s a beautiful area to grow grapes because the dry, hot days means we have very little disease pressure. So we’re not spraying the vines every day. So organically it’s a very attractive place to grow grapes.
Our greatest restraint is the lack of water. Otherwise I believe this district would be ten times as big as what it is now. We have to remember that the Canberra wine region is only a fifth of the size of the Hunter Valley, yet we have a profile which is the same as the Hunter Valley, and this is why people like my good friend Bruce Tyrrell and others in the Hunter say, ‘I don’t know how you guys do it down there but you’re doing something right’, and it’s the grapes. And the grapes go through and make great wines.
Emma: Absolutely. In your opinion what’s unique about our terroir here in Canberra - you were talking about Hunter versus Canberra - and then how do you find that expressed it at Helm?
Ken: Well what’s unique is what I already mentioned before is we have more sunshine than any other capital except Perth, and that is an asset but also it can detract. Riesling hates to have sunburnt fruit. If the fruit gets sunburnt you get that kerosene-y character coming through which is a fault. Some people say it’s an attribute but I think they’re trying to sell wine when they say that. It’s more of a fault, and I don’t like it. So we have to be very careful that we don’t get sunburning of our skins on the grapes of Riesling, otherwise you get that kerosene-y character. So we grow our vines east-west, we make sure we keep the foliage on, we even use the close planting of the vines to allow one row to stop the reflected heat into the vine canopy. And so we cut down on that. But the sunlight is unique. It allows us to ripen fruit and 9 ½ years out of 10, without any problem whatsoever.
The other is of course as I said earlier Bateman’s Breath, the sea breeze that comes in, that is again unique, and if you don’t have cool nights and warm, hot dry days you can’t produce high quality fruit. So the soils are varied right across the region and also our other interesting thing in Canberra is we’re here at 600m above sea level. You go out to the other side of Canberra to Lark Hill near Bungendore you’re at 880 m. You go out to Lake George where you have the escarpment where the sun goes off the vineyards at around 3 o’clock which gives another complete change. Go down to Hall and they’re in a little heat sink there which is a little bit warmer than other areas. So not only do we have a terroir across the whole of the Canberra district, but we have four separate ones as well, and there may be others we haven’t discovered yet. So that makes the Canberra district unique in many, many ways, that we have these locations people can go to.
Image: Ken with daughter Stephanie Helm of The Vintners' Daughter
Emma: So that segues nicely into our last question which is, where do you think the region will be in 20 years’ time?
Ken: That’s a very difficult question to ask. If you’d asked me that say, 10 years ago, I would’ve said we were like the Hunter Valley was 20 years ago. The area is developing so rapidly now. All the infrastructure that the Hunter Valley has and is developing is now coming to this district. But the other, most important thing, is that we have Canberra on our doorstep. And so we didn’t have to build the hotels and restaurants, they’re there, they’re 20 minutes down the road. And so people can come out of Sydney, they don’t have to try and find a restaurant, there are so many wonderful eating establishments and 5 star restaurants in Canberra. There’s a lovely range of accommodation. And I hope we don’t have a golf course built out here, I think we have enough golf courses in Canberra, so we don’t really need that.
But I see the other things that’ll be coming, maybe more family orientated attractions that will bring people down where they can visit Canberra and the regions, we already have it of course with places like Questacon. But out in the regions I see that there will be more and more development. I see that there will be more grapes planted, as soon as we can organise the water issue. And that could well be even looking at Canberra and bringing the grey water from Molonglo Treatment Works and using that for the development of bigger vineyards. Graham Shaw at Shaw Vineyard Estate and myself did an assessment of that a number of years ago and actually employed people to look at it. There’s enough water there being dropped in the river each day that we could irrigate another 500 hectares of vines if we built a pipeline. And of course that’s what’s being used in a lot of other wine growing regions, grey water as a potential use for intensive agriculture. And so those are the sort of things in 20 years’ time. Population is going to increase, the road to Sydney is getting better, so we’ll be, I think, better than the Hunter.
This interview took place at the Helm cellar door, autumn 2021.
Images: Sammy Hawker.