James Erskine
GROWER/winemaker
Jauma wines
Adelaide Hills, South Australia
Spotlight No. 09
James Erskine has an affinity for Grenache, specifically the Grenache that comes from the Priorat, in Catalonia, Spain. Having grown up with the extracted styles of Grenache in Australia, he found the vivid expression of a Priorat Grenache an epiphany. In fact, everything about Catalonia and its people felt right to James: their spirit of independència, their creativity and joy for life, the rustic food and the wild landscape. James was inspired and decided to name his new wine Jauma (the way his names sounds in Catalan) and to make wines that would show his homeland a new kind of Grenache. The affinity ran deeper than he realized, because his intuitive philosophies about viticulture were similar to what has been practiced in the Priorat for generations.
There was every reason why it should work. He could find old vines dry farmed without the use of any chemicals. The climate was similar to that in the Priorat, with hot sunny days and ocean breezes cooling the air at night. The only difference was the soil. He did not have the Priorat llicorella, but he had a whole lot of other soils, and if there is something other than wine that James is passionate about, it is dirt! He did study soil sciences, after all.
James started his education at a hotelier school. He thought he would open a restaurant one day, but he got a job as a sommelier, and that changed everything. He instantly fell in love with the amazing array of sensory experiences wine offered. That led him to study at the University of California, Davis, and work vintages in Austria and Germany. And then there is the school of life, which James attends quite passionately. He spends time with his grapes along every step of the journey from grape to wine. He would no more feed his vines chemicals than he would his human children, and he and Fiona Wood have formed a solid partnership founded on that basic principle. Their mutual respect for nature works perfectly, with Fiona in charge of the vineyards and James in charge of the cellar.
The day I spent with James in the Adelaide Hills was about as idyllic as one can imagine the life of a winemaker to be. He collected me in his little, old truck and drove me along the small roads through what felt like magical forests with prisms of light dancing in the softness of the shade. Between the trees I could see the sunlit expanses of vineyards. Whenever we stopped to visit a vineyard, James would stick his hand in the dirt and bring up all kinds of sand and rocks, as if he could not resist touching the earth.
With that kind of connection to the vineyards, it is no surprise that James avoids intervention with the natural fermentation process in the cellar. The earth, nature’s palette, turns the grapes into beautiful portraits in wine all by themselves. For James, this is the key: “Sense of place has the power to take you on a journey, and when the senses are enlivened you realize anything is possible.” And this is where his kinship with Catalonia really comes in: their shared belief in illusiós, in the possibility that dreams can become reality, never waivers and that allows space for the creativity they share too.
As we were leaving one of the vineyards, a friend stopped to say hello. I waited in the truck, unintentionally listening to the wine guys talk about the weather, the grapes, what will be ripening when — shop talk. They were sitting on the back of the truck and I could tell they were happy because I could hear the thump of feet on the bumper as their legs swung back and forth, the way they do when we are at peace with life.
