Cate Looney
TRIALLING WORLD-FIRST WINES
Whether she’s making traditional method sparkling wine or experimenting with entirely new grape varieties, there’s no typical day for winemaker Cate Looney.
In Victoria’s dynamic King Valley, Cate and her team are helping to change the face of Australian wine. She’s a long-time winemaker at Brown Brothers, established in the late 1880s and today a leader in Australian wine. Having worked her way up the ranks, Cate is now a senior winemaker, and has won a string of wine show medals and trophies, including her sparkling wine. But that’s only half the story: Brown Brothers is a hotbed of innovation and Cate’s excited about the things she’s been doing behind the scenes.
Where tradition and innovation unite
In Brown Brothers’ small, experimental Kindergarten winery, Cate has the luxury of making mistakes. The facility was set up for the purpose of trial and error, and under Chief Winemaker Joel Tilbrook, Cate and the winemaking team explore different techniques and wine styles.
It’s the kind of creativity she was looking for when she left her early career in food technology in the late 1990s and studied wine science instead. In 2005, Cate joined Brown Brothers, a household name that’s still first and foremost a family business.
“Working at Brown Brothers, we get to work with family members, which is really lovely, and you get treated like a large family,” says Cate. “We’ve got a lot of history and tradition here, but we also have the innovation side, which has been going for as long as they have been making wine.”
Cate and the team, work with more than 40 grape varieties from Brown Brothers’ vineyards.“We get to experiment with so many different varieties, and new and different things all the time,” she says. “If we make mistakes, it’s not the world’s biggest disaster. We learn and move on.”
One area that’s been getting a lot of attention is the trialing of new varieties developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) that suit Australia’s unique growing conditions.
“There are some new breeds that we’re looking at and they’re really quite interesting because we don’t have any idea how they’ll turn out,” says Cate. “So it’s ground zero for winemaking.”
Alongside these very modern world-first wines, Cate also produces award-winning traditional method sparkling wines using age-old techniques.
“In Australia, we aren't stuck to a set of rules,” she says. “There’s an openness to trying different things and using different techniques. It’s unique.”
“We aren’t stuck to a set of rules. There’s an openness to trying different things and using different techniques.”
– Cate Looney
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