‘Jeté’, meaning ‘to leap’ in French, perfectly reflects the bold beginning of this sparkling collection – a leap of faith into unknown terroir.

In the mid-2000’s, Méthode Traditionnelle was not a style of wine that was synonymous with Western Australia. Regions such as the Yarra Valley in Victoria, the Adelaide Hills in South Australia and Tasmania had either established themselves as Australia’s Home of Sparkling or were beginning to gain notoriety as premium producers. 

Yet, Howard Park’s owners, the Burch family, saw potential. 

By 2005, Jeff Burch and his family were already enmeshed in the burgeoning wine industry of Western Australia, having established wineries in both Denmark and Margaret River. They had also just purchased a new site, in the Great Southern, which would go on to form the backbone of Howard Park’s sparkling wine program. 

This site, known now as the Mount Barrow vineyard, is located near the Porongurup and Stirling ranges. It is remote, with elevations of up to 380m, making it the highest altitude vineyard in the region and has a cool continental climate. Burch identified that the site shared similarities with the Champagne region, and sensed it would provide the ideal growing conditions for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. 

However, it needed work. A lot of work. It was little more than a green field, and the infrastructure was non-existent. The Burch family had to start from scratch. They imported clones from France, and cultivated a nursery so they could nurture the vines and grow grapes to suit the style of wine they were, by this stage, obsessed with. 

Second generation vigneron, Richard Burch, discloses, that those early days and early wines left them questioning their decisions;

“Growing grapes in the Great Southern has its own unique set of challenges…there was a lot of trial and error and in the first five years the wines weren’t anywhere close to where we wanted them to be.”

“For a moment we thought – what have we done?”

Richard continues to explain that not only was the site tough, the specialist equipment needed to make the wine was expensive and as he goes onto explain, “many don’t realise is that to make sparkling wines in the traditional method you have to have tirage them for a minimum of 18 months. That’s a long time to patiently wait for wines to be ready.” 

“But we persisted. We’ve held on and each year the wines got better and better,” He concludes. 

Fast forward almost 20 years and the site has settled, the vines have established and Howard Park are continuing to finesse the wines in the pursuit to make world-class Western Australian sparkling wines.   

Today there are four wines in the collection: 2019 Howard Park Grand Jeté, NV Howard Park Jeté Premier Brut, NV Howard Park Jeté Rosé and NV Howard Park Petit Jeté. 

The Jeté collection has been highly celebrated this year. Most recently, Howard Park’s Jeté Rosé NV was crowned Best Sparkling Rosé at the Australian Sparkling Wine Show, marking the first time a Western Australian winery has claimed this coveted trophy at the nation’s only dedicated sparkling wine competition. Additional accolades for the collection include:

 

You can purchase any of our trophy-winning Howard Park méthode traditionnelle sparkling wines here.