Fogarty Wine Group

Reading season before cellar

John Fogarty reads vineyard conditions as Head Viticulturist for Fogarty Wine Group in West Perth, where the work begins before a fermenter is filled. Since 2002, John Fogarty has held the long view inside a business built across regions rather than around one cellar door. His station is not a single row of vines outside the office window. It is the set of decisions that carries from season to season, vineyard to winery, and winery to bottle, with enough continuity that one wet spring or dry summer does not become the whole argument.

At the West Perth base, Fogarty works as Chief Viticulturist and Director and Head Viticulturist, a role that places him between the land and the operating structure of the group. The title sounds managerial, but the discipline is still viticultural: reading soil, weather and vineyard condition closely enough to make practical calls hold up across different sites. The group describes its work through sustainable production, and the craft here sits in that patient register, where stewardship depends less on display than on repeated judgement. His later work as co-creator of Goon Tycoons, begun in 2016, sits beside that line rather than replacing it. The durable thread is still the vineyard, and the ability to keep separate projects coherent over time.

A portfolio worked through vineyards

Fogarty Wine Group is a multi-estate Australian wine company, not a single-estate winery with one public-facing tasting room. Its West Perth office supports a portfolio that includes Dalwhinnie in the Pyrenees, Lake’s Folly in the Hunter Valley, Deep Woods Estate and Evans & Tate in Margaret River, Millbrook Winery in the Perth Hills, Smithbrook in Pemberton, Lowestoft and Tasmanian Vintners in Tasmania. That spread gives the group a different craft problem from a cellar built around one slope: the method has to respect regional difference while keeping enough discipline at group level for each estate to remain legible.

The clearest operational detail is integration. The group operates vineyard management services and a wine bottling facility, which puts part of the viticultural pipeline and part of the finished-wine pathway within the same broader house. For Fogarty, that means the vineyard call is not isolated from what follows. The fruit has to move through a structure that can hold cool-climate sites, coastal vineyards, forested Western Australian country and older Australian wine regions without flattening them into one house style. The company does not state a single group-wide cellar method, so the more precise craft fact is the architecture itself: many regions, one operating discipline, vineyard decisions made with the bottling end still in view.

The quiet office behind the estates

The room in West Perth is an office, not a cellar cut into stone or a tasting bench dressed for visitors. Its atmosphere is quiet, professional and businesslike, with the work pointed outward toward vineyards and wineries elsewhere in Australia. The place matters because it is where the estate language is gathered, compared and turned into decisions. A vineyard report from Margaret River carries a different weather memory from one in Tasmania; a mature Hunter Valley name asks for a different kind of restraint than a newer brand architecture. The head office has to make space for those differences without turning them into noise.

That texture suits the work. Fogarty Wine Group’s base on Ord Street is a place for allocation, planning, viticultural review and the unglamorous parts of continuity. The cellar may be elsewhere, but the hand is still present in the choices that precede it. If the next movement here is not a public release from one bench, it is the continuing discipline of holding Dalwhinnie, Lake’s Folly, Deep Woods Estate, Evans & Tate, Millbrook Winery, Smithbrook, Lowestoft and Tasmanian Vintners inside one viticultural frame.