Brian Fletcher
Australia
Brian's Wines
- Australia
- 13 wines
- 6 styles
Veteran Australian winemaker raising the bar for Aussie wines
- Once the chief winemaker for Evans & Tate, Brian is one of Margaret River’s greatest treasures — and ours! In 30+ years in the business, he’s collected over 50 Trophies and 100s of medals. He works with a trusted network of exceptional local growers who guarantee him the best fruit. “They're as important to the process as anything,” he says. “ It’s their grapes you are drinking and I’m the translator.”
- He’s also a wizz in European wine production, earned through back-breaking vintages in old wineries in Italy and Tunisia. In fact, it was during Brian’s 5-year stint in Italy that he truly found his wine feet and decided there was no other life for him.
- Even with a resume like his, getting Naked in 2012 was a big deal for Brian. It meant he could create his own wines in his own name and share them with big-hearted wine lovers like you. And the direct connection to chat with you is the icing on the cake!
Brian Fletcher's Story
I make wines from the Margaret River region in Western Australia. I’ve made wine since my first vintage at Petaluma in the Adelaide Hills in 1979 – that’s 50 vintages both in Australia and doubling up in the northern hemisphere. How the wine world has changed in that time!
I’ve worked in many regions and dealt with all sorts of varieties and situations. For example, during the 2000’s, I worked in Italy for five years. I was responsible for three locations: Sicily (the main winery), Puglia, and Tunisia where I worked out of an old colonial French chateau making Carignan.
Talk about history – you could find bits of Roman mosaic in the olive groves and the chateau had a Roman sarcophagus in the front garden! It was there that I became laser-focused. It gave me confidence to move forward when I came home to Margaret River.
As a young winemaker, I spent most of my formative years at Great Western in Victoria. It was a place with a great winemaking history and that rubbed off on me – I felt very lucky and privileged to work there.
Awards? Counting back, I’ve taken home about fifty major trophies. For me, they don’t give bragging rights, but some stand out as particular personal milestones.
The first one was a Riesling in 1981 in Brisbane. Then, in 2000, I won the Best Red Wine at the International Wine Challenge in London. And last year I was awarded the Best Mature Dry Red at the Sydney Wine Show for a (not Naked) Cabernet.
However, the award I’m most proud of was awarded by the Italian Professional Fishers Association for the “Best White Wine to go with Fish.” Well, Brian, you might say, give me a break… but to my Italian friends this was life itself. “How else could you have wine without food?”
My journey with Naked Wines has been a lot of fun. It’s been a great experience to meet the Angels at real tastings (the coalface for any winemaker) and talk online. I put a lot of myself into my wines and after all this time, I’m reasonably thick skinned! I think the Naked Wines approach lets me explain a lot more about what I have done and what I would like to do in a winemaking sense. It still is very much a voyage to the edge of the earth.
And finally, a word about the growers. I’m lucky to work with growers who really care. They're as important to the process as anything – it’s their grapes you are drinking and I’m the translator. If you think of it that way, then you can’t go wrong in your wine experiences.
