From bartender to owner, then winemaker; Ollie Margan is home

Ollie Margan became an award-winning bartender, a bar owner, and a central figure in the development of the Adelaide bar scene. Now, writes Sam Bygrave, he’s back home in the Hunter Valley — and leading the family business.

It’s still dark when I turn off the road and into the Margan winery in Broke, up in the Hunter Valley, just after six. The sun won’t rise for another 50 minutes. It’s the middle of January, and it’s set to be a hot day. But right now, the air is cool. Out back of the winery, they’re harvesting grapes from a block of albariño — and they’ve already been at it for a couple of hours. 

“We do as much harvesting as we can at night,” Ollie Margan tells me, as he makes us coffee in the bar of the winery’s restaurant. We take those coffees outside as the harvester moves closer to the winery.

“The mornings at this time of year, when we have these weeks where you’ve got the cool, cool nights and the hot days — and look, it’ll all culminate in a hectic thunderstorm this afternoon, and then we’re back in the tropics — but you get a few of these; this is so silent and still.”

The early start, however, has more to do with the grapes than beginning his work day in a meditative state.

“We start at about 4am,” Ollie says. “That gives us one whole shift of picking before it gets too hot. Because when it gets hot, everything starts to get stickier in the machinery. The equipment doesn’t like it. But when it’s cold, everything’s crisp, and when you hit [the grapes] everything snaps off the vine.”

They’ve just picked a block of semillon and chardonnay the morning before, all done by hand; the albariño, on the other hand, takes the rigours of the machine harvester better.

“For semillon it’s really important to preserve the delicacy of [the grape], so we’ll just hand pick all of that,” he says. 

“But something like albariño, it’s an aromatic grape, and a bit of maceration with the skins before we press it off is really great. So we’re happy to machine harvest that.”

THE HUNTER VALLEY IS WHAT your wine textbook will describe as a warm maritime climate. That’s despite the Hunter Valley — Australia’s first wine region, with a history dating back to the 1830s — being some 100 kilometres inland from the coast and the Pacific Ocean.

“Whilst it’s super hot here, the next couple of nights are 12 degrees,” Ollie says. “That’s why the Hunter Valley functions as a good, white grape-growing, warm climate region, whereas somewhere like the Barossa and the McLaren Vale can sometimes struggle because they have this relentless heat.

“We have what they call diurnal variation, which is the cooling impact of the coast — and we’re not on the coast. The prevailing nor’easterly breeze in the afternoon coming off the ocean cools the valley.”

He points to the tree line 300 metres to the east, which runs along Wollombi Brook. “That’s why the vineyard was planted there. It’s this sinkhole of cold air. Because you’ve got a body of water there, it means that you’re dealing with about eight hours of proper warmth during the day, but 16 hours of pretty mild to cool temperatures.”

This is when Ollie Margan, ever the scholar, offers a quick lesson in what is actually going on inside those grapes.

“The grapevine does most of its work during the day, obviously photosynthesising, storing sugars, but then it really processes and uses those in the evening,” he says. ”And when it’s going through that process, that’s when the acidity is quite vulnerable. So if you give the plant a bit of a reprieve, temperature-wise, it’ll keep its acidity whilst it converts all those carbohydrates into amino acids and complex sugars — and that’s where you get flavour.”

This is just how conversations with Ollie go. He’s armed with a capacious memory, and a deep understanding of the topics he studies.

And it was studying that brought Ollie Margan into the world of bartending. It’s the way many get into the industry — working in a bar to support themselves during study. But not everyone ends up building the career that Ollie Margan did, winning awards, becoming a financial partner in the bar, and a central figure in the development of one of the country’s most exciting bar scenes — before giving it all up. 

OLLIE IS THE THIRD generation of the Margan family to make wine. In fact, the family’s history is intertwined with the history of not just the Hunter Valley, but Australian wine. 

Ollie’s father, Andrew, worked at Tyrrell’s before starting Margan Wines in 1996, having planted their first vineyard in 1991. But it was Ollie’s grandfather, Frank Margan, who first got the family into wine.

“[Frank] was a journalist and a writer. He was editor at The Bulletin, and had got the sack from The Daily Telegraph. He wrote a bunch of historical books, and a few pretty self-indulgent books. 

“One of them is called The Grape and I, which is basically talking about the birth of table wine in Australia.”

Frank Margan was also an instrumental part in the Australian Wine Bureau that was set up by wine industry legend Len Evans in the 1960s.

“Wine was fortified stuff,” explains Ollie, “sold by the flagon — ports and sherrys. And in the 50s, that’s really the beginning of table wine in Australia.

“This Australian Wine Bureau was set up to do two things. Number one was to go around Australian wine regions and educate and inform these people on what the future of the Australian wine industry should look like. You need to pull out those vineyards, and stop making fortified wines, and you need to make table wine as a brand to the rest of the world. So that was one purpose, and the other purpose was to start marketing Australian wine as a brand to the rest of the world.

“And my grandfather became the copywriter for this body and their office was in Bulletin Place.” Decades later, Bulletin Place would become known as one of the great Australian cocktail bars, pioneering a distinctly Australian sensibility — one that would later inspire Ollie in his own bartending career. 

Ollie’s father spent his summer school holidays helping out with the harvest next door at Tyrrell’s.

“He enjoyed that,” Ollie says, “and decided that it was what he wanted to do. He ended up working for Tyrrell’s for 20 years.

“He did a bit over in France, and bizarrely, he made wine for a bit in Moldova. So the first year and a half of my life was spent bouncing between Bordeaux and Moldova.” His parents were young — his dad in his early thirties, and his mother, Lisa, in her late twenties — and Moldova was navigating the end of the Soviet Union the year before their arrival in 1992. “It was a pretty wild thing to do,” Ollie says.

OLLIE WENT TO ADELAIDE to study winemaking, but then ended up running one Australia’s best bars, Maybe Mae, opening it 2014. 

“It was all a bit accidental,” he says. “Having grown up around [wine], I kind of felt like I needed to do something that was outside of it and autonomous, and  have some level of success in something that was not this. If I’m going to slipstream into the family [business], I need to feel like I could have done something if I wanted to outside of that.”

Before Maybe Mae arrived in Adelaide, the bar scene was very small — nothing like the thriving scene of independent small bars that you’ll find in the city today.

“The timing was fortuitous in the sense that the small bar licence [legislation] was only really approved in 2013,” says Ollie. “That was the thing that really opened the door to boutique offerings and focused offerings.”

At Maybe Mae, Ollie took cues from what Bulletin Place — the bar from owners Tim Philips, Rob Sloan, and Adi Ruiz — was doing in Sydney, focusing on fresh, seasonal ingredients from local farmers, producers, and distilleries. It was an approach not seen in many places at the time, let alone Adelaide.

“That comes back to the fact that I didn’t have any cocktail bar experience in terms of visiting cocktail bars,” says Ollie. “And so Bulletin Place opens, we had this family connection to this place — I realised that this bar has opened in my grandfather’s old office — so we go there. And the thing that really resonated with me from that place, number one, was these drinks and this sort of service, which felt really great.”

Maybe Mae went on to rack up the awards, Ollie became a co-owner of the business, and picked up cocktail competition wins along the way with his inventive drinks that respected the ingredients he used — and always bringing this winemaker’s eye to the task. His drinks have always been finely balanced, drinkable and approachable — the kind of drinks you’ll gladly order again.

But in 2020, Ollie stepped away from the day to day operations of Maybe Mae, and returned to the Hunter Valley and his family’s winery. He launched his own series of wines under the Margan banner, called Breaking Ground, releasing an albarino, chardonnay, barbera, and a shiraz in 2021.

Today, whilst his father Andrew is still very much involved, Ollie has taken the lead, responsible for all the wines under the Margan label.

WHAT DOES LIFE LOOK LIKE making wine? The harvest at Margan typically last between six and 10 weeks. “I block out the calendar from January to March,” Ollie says.

But it’s not all grape picking and and fermenting wine — you’ve got to sell the stuff too. 

“No one wants to see you in December,” Ollie says. “So you do a big push in November, try and get some listings over summer.”

After the harvest is done and the wine is into tanks, they do the rounds in the trade, and try to sell a bit of wine, before a little time off in April.

“We’ll start pruning in May,” Ollie says, and in between will go on a roadshow to showcase new wines to their members.

“And then June, July, it’s full on pruning because we don’t buy any grapes,” he says. “Everything we bottle, we’ve farmed ourselves.”

It’s an uncommon practice in the Valley, he says. “Because it’s a lot of work. But it means that we get to have that control.”

That control extends to the vineyard, where they’ve reinvigorated soils and moved to an organic way of farming.

“Our [vineyard] management here has been organic, but probably the more important thing is that it is regenerative. We put more carbon into the soil than we take out each year.”

They’ve done that by encouraging animals in the vineyard. “You need to have a mixture of flora in and around the vines. You use animals to cycle nutrients — so they come through, they eat the weeds, they shit, and then the microbes in the topsoil do the rest.”

But don’t let the organic vineyard management make you think they’re making natural wine here.

“There’s a little bit of a misconception that the two things are kind of integrated,” Ollie says. “And I would suggest that more often than not, people that farm their own grapes aren’t gravitating to winemaking styles like [natural wine] because there’s way too much effort here [in the vineyard] to have a low strike rate in terms of wine quality.

“If you look at the brilliant wine producers all around the world, they don’t filter their wines, they don’t ferment with packet yeast, they don’t acid adjust their wines. They [also] don’t make a song and dance around what they’re not doing. 

“The point is, if you can get that fruit to a bottle with as little stops along the way as possible, it’s going to be the best expression of site. And if the sight’s good enough to warrant that, then that’s how you’re going to make a great wine.”

OLLIE MAY HAVE TRADED the late nights of bartending for the early morning worldview of a winemaking farmer, but that doesn’t mean that every morning is serene — far from it. There is a lot of hard work involved. And nor are the days any more predictable. What it means is that he’s just acquired a whole new set of surprises to deal with.

Sometimes that’s because the growing conditions are challenging. And sometimes it’s because new problems present themselves.

“We had a wild pig problem this year,” Ollie tells me, flabbergasted. “Between birds and the wild pigs, they probably ate one and a half tonne of grapes, 1500 kilos.”

I ask him much wine that equates to. “A couple of pallets of wine,” he says.

“There’s an infrared camera down there," he continues. “30 pigs. We’ve got a trap and we’ve got a guy with dogs who is trying to get rid of them — we caught four in the trap one night. And they’re not little.”

It was one problem on the vineyard that they had never experienced before. 

“Everything else though,” Ollie says. “Then it’s been really hot. December was hot and dry. We had no rain. And then last week we had some pretty huge storms.” 

Ask him if there has been a year when everything went perfectly, and, well, there have been mixed results.

“2023 wasn’t too bad,” he says. But 2021 and 22 were all just gnarly because you had Covid hitting through all of that. But 2020 was bushfires. We lost the whole year of production. 2021 was incredibly wet and we had a really bad hailstorm on Boxing Day of Christmas 2020 — it eviscerated a lot of very ripe vineyards. You had berries bursting everywhere, so there’s sugar everywhere and therefore you get the botrytis mold coming in. It just proliferated.”

But, the thing with winemaking, Ollie says, is that it’s iterative — you always get a new year to do things differently.

“I really liked the wines out of last year,” he says. “This year feels similar in terms of heat, but the chemistry that we’re seeing [in the grapes] is significantly better.”

However the harvest goes, you get the sense that Ollie is where he’s supposed to be.

“I love it,” he says. “There’s an adrenaline to the whole thing. There’s something quite attractive about creating something that is a snapshot of the time and place.”

This story appeared in the autumn issue of Boothby magazine. To support Boothby, and get the next year's issues to your door, sign up here. Your support of Boothby means a lot.