Jeff Byrne came to Australia in 1995 with a backpack, a love of Caribbean rum and, bizarrely, a love of surfing.
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Bizarrely because in his homeland of Canada – he’s from Halifax, Nova Scotia – temperatures can regularly plummet to between minus 10 and minus 30 Celsius. Average snowfall is more than 150cm a year. Surfing season is short to say the least and not for the faint hearted .
“Head to toe wetsuits,” he explains. Thick ones at that.
Wines weren’t exactly new to him, but they came a distant third behind his much loved rum and a cold beer. But life’s full of strange twists, especially for a 22-year-old on a gap year.
In the back of a Gold Coast maxi taxi he bumped into a girl called Bridgette. And his life changed.
Fast forward 21 years and they’re married with three children –Caitlyn 13, Lauren 10 and Bree 6 – and he’s one of the Hunter Valley’s bright young winemakers, in charge of not one, but three labels … Audrey Wilkinson, Poole’s Rock and Cockfighter’s Ghost.
He doesn’t get much chance to surf these days, and a few years back he finally called a halt to his other sporting passion, ice hockey.
“For seven years I played for the Newcastle North Stars,” he explained.
So is it the world’s most violent sport? “Possibly,” he says with a big grin, reflecting perhaps on the madness of youth.
These days the Canadian accent is punctuated by the occasional word of true blue drawl – you can’t miss it. And chances are it’s only going to get worse because he has no intentions of going anywhere. The Hunter is in his heart.
“We moved here for Bridgette’s work, and I was lucky to get a cellar door job at Tower Estate,” he said. “I enjoyed that and sometimes I would get to help out in the winery when they were short – I loved that even more.”
The rest is history.
“There’s a real mateship in the Hunter wine community which I love being a part of,” he says.
Part of the reason, no doubt, is that Byrne is a hard bloke to dislike. He’s down to earth and the big smile is never far away.
Certainly under his guiding hand Audrey Wilkinson is going from strength to strength. It has the highest ranking of five red stars in the James Halliday Australian Wine Companion – the bible for wineries. Cockfighter’s Ghost is on the second highest tier – five black stars.
If you don’t know his wines, they’re impressive all right. He has a real touch with semillon and chardonnay in particular, picking up a swag of trophies. And besides that, the Audrey Wilkinson cellar door is one of the Hunter’s most spectacular with stunning views.
A dazzling semillon and a dazzling view. What are you waiting for?
