I vividly recall my first meeting with Kathleen Quealy. I had tasted and delighted in her Pobblebonk field blend of Friulano, Riesling and Pinot Gris, and followed it up with the Rageous red, an unlikely marriage of Sangiovese, Shiraz and Pinot Noir. Among the Mornington Peninsula’s calm little sea of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, these outlandishly named, labelled and assembled interlopers smacked of anarchy.

Rocking up at Balnarring Vineyard felt like landing in the outskirts of an Irish country town where time stands still. A charmingly ramshackle, take-us-as-you-find-us backyard of ambling hens, drying washing, bicycles and bric-a-brac announced, fittingly, the home of the Quealy-McCarthy clan.

That wasn’t your average interview. Unfiltered, unguarded candour and randomness spilt out, and I learned and laughed a lot. We’ve spoken a lot in the intervening years, but this episode 25 of Vininspo! podcast still felt like the first time.

Max Loder was the viticultural lecturer and Pinot Gris advocate who influenced Kathleen during her time at what is now the Charles Sturt University campus in Wagga Wagga, NSW. Her husband, Kevin McCarthy, did his winemaking studies at Roseworthy Agricultural College (discussed at length here). T’Gallant is the name of the winery they founded on the Mornington Peninsula in 1990. Thirteen years later, they sold it to Southcorp, which was subsumed by Fosters and morphed into Treasury Wine Estates. TWE sold T’Gallant in 2022; it has since reopened under new ownership and continues to operate from its Main Ridge home.

Kathleen was dubbed the Queen of Pinot Gris by the renowned Australian wine commentator James Halliday, for whose Coldstream Hills estate Kevin McCarthy worked in the Yarra Valley in the mid-1980s. Her range has bottlings labelled Grigio and Gris; generally speaking, Australian producers use the Italian styling to denote a crisper, lighter-bodied rendition that leans towards the grape’s airier aromas and lightly fruity side. Gris, from the French for “grey”, tends to denote a riper, more richly textured rendition with more spice and earthy, exotic aromas.

On the subject of Pinot Gris, I reference Max Allen’s book, Alternative Reality, which Max and I discussed on episode 24. The Chalmers family is central to that book and crops up when Kathleen and I discuss sourcing so-called alternative grape varieties. The best place to hear more about that fascinating area is by tuning into episode 17 of the podcast with Kim Chalmers.

Quealy Winemakers is based at the organic-certified Balnarring Vineyard on the Mornington Peninsula. Its range of wines takes in Pinot Noir and Chardonnay—the region’s most celebrated grapes—and much more besides. The diverse and distinctive label artwork by celebrated designer Ken Cato is in keeping with this estate’s singularity.

Kathleen is justly proud of the progress her son, Tom McCarthy, has made. Tom’s range of skin-contact wines is called Turbul. It began over a decade ago with a Friulano that spent an extended period of time in contact with its skins to become a so-called orange or amber wine. As mentioned, this range has grown to four wines, with Malvasia, Ribolla Gialla and Moscato Giallo entering the fold. They are proper, considered, fully realised wines of intent; I urge you to watch this video and seek them out. While these wines take their cue from traditions around the border of Slovenia and northeast Italy, Tom has also followed in footsteps closer to home; in 2008, Kevin McCarthy’s T’Gallant Claudius gave Australia its first fully committed amber wine from Chardonnay, Traminer and Moscato Giallo.

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