Education

"While at uni, I worked in a bottle shop. I’d been exposed to great wine but never thought of it as a career. At the end of 2000, I took a break from uni and travelled around Australia. I met some wonderful people at wine tastings. By 2001, I was studying winemaking at Wagga Wagga’s Charles Sturt University. I loved how it combined the academic, the physical and the creative."

2001 - 2005 - BA Applied Science (Wine Science) Charles Sturt University

"After uni, Kimberley worked as a vet in Singleton, north-west of Sydney, and I was assistant winemaker at nearby Drayton’s winery. We were thrilled to get jobs in the same place."

Subsequent years were spent working in Mudgee, Orange, Yarra Valley, Bordeaux and the Hunter Valley as well as judging in many regional and national wine shows.

Rikard-Bell and his veterinarian wife Kimberley have also bought a 10 hectare-block at an elevation of 1050 metres near Mount Canobolas where they will raise their two daughters and nurture their business. A plan has been submitted to council to build a cellar door and winery so Rikard-Bell can continue his bread and butter as a contract winemaker for about 16 labels. He founded the contract business Chill Wine Co with winemaker Charlie Svenson of respected vineyard De Salis before buying him out.

The land acquisition will allow him to plant several clones of their pinot and chardonnay, and later some riesling - so he can build on the success of Rikard Wines.

“The vineyard will be going in in November [2018] and it’s three years before we get a crop and up to seven before we get a decent crop, so I am trying to source fruit of similar growing conditions [in the interim] so that when we do finally transition across to our own fruit it is not a huge jump in style,” he says. “I’m not here to make wine for other people, even though I rely on them liking it and buying it, I make it because that’s what I like to drink and I kind of hope that people like what I make."

“The future is looking pretty rosy: we’ve just had a really good vintage.”

Kimberley Rikard-Bell says her husband’s “one mindedness” has allowed him to achieve a dream he has held since switching from a medical degree to wine-making degree in his mid-20s (he’s now 41 in 2021).

“If you asked him at the start of his degree what he wanted to do it would have been building his own label, he wouldn’t have otherwise been satisfied,” she says of his pluck. “The way he makes wine – every grape that comes in is handpicked and put in a 10-kilogram basket and everyone thinks we are crazy because it costs three times as much compared to [traditional] machine picking, but the quality is so much better..”

The single-mindedness that has led to singularity in winemaking also stood the young winemaker in good stead when tragedy struck at Hunter winery Draytons on a rainy summer’s day in January, 2008. An assistant winemaker under leading vigneron Trevor Drayton, Rikard-Bell arrived on site and was standing inside the main processing shed when an explosion ripped through it. "I’d worked two vintages at Drayton’s before this accident."

Trevor Drayton, mere footsteps from Rikard-Bell at the time of the explosion, was killed alongside Eddie Orgo, a contract worker who was welding near near a metal wine vat, unaware that it contained flammable liquid before he began working.
 
“I remember it very clearly, it’s amazing how slow everything is when that sort of thing happens, I remember everything except the noise,” says Rikard-Bell, who was blown off his feet. Protected by an empty wine vat that nonetheless toppled, he was set alight but managed to crawl out of the shed and run to a dam, where he waited for paramedics to arrive.

“It was ‘I’m on fire, let’s get out of the building, got to get to water, there’s the dam, that’ll do, no um-ing and ah-ing,” he says. “I had no idea, I thought I would be back at work a couple of weeks later … I thought ‘I am missing some skin, I have some burns, I didn’t realise the full extent of it. Burns are funny, it hurts but everything else works – your mind, your breathing, you don’t feel injured. “It was only once I was in the dam waiting for the helicopter that I started to swell up and get stiff and sore and once the paramedics said ‘we are not coming in to get you, you have to walk out’ when I went, ‘Oh, this isn’t good’.

(Source: Daily Telegraph 4 May 2008)

Flown to the John Hunter Hospital with burns to 70 per cent of his body – his chest, face and feet untouched – he was transferred to the burns unit in Concord Hospital. “I got an infection a couple of weeks in, I mean you are lying there with no skin for weeks and it’s near impossible to keep the bugs out,” Rikard-Bell says.

Finding it tough not to be able to have hugs from family, he was determined not to let his injuries “define” him, as he saw other burns victims allow themselves to do. “It was ‘Right, focus, this [recovery] is your job for the next two years,” he recalls. “I like that sort of challenge; I was always the one vomiting at the end of the day at footy training because I tried so hard. “I was very lucky to have a medical family that took care of absolutely everything around me and so all I had to focus on was getting up, physio and so on.”

Rikard-Bell endured multiple skin grafting operations over two months in hospital and spent another two months as an out patient in Sydney before returning to Singleton. Eleven months later, he wed Kimberley, who says her training as a vet allowed her to assist him with the constant and lengthy dressing changes.

“You don’t panic, there’s no ‘Woe is me’,” she says, while conceding it was difficult to see the man she met as a student at 22 at Sydney University in such pain. “We are both country people and that has something to do with it. When bad things happen you just deal with it and keep going.”

Rikard-Bell returned to Draytons to assume the role of chief winemaker – the first person not directed related to the family to do so – something he said he feels proud to have done to honour his late boss. “They were very supportive, just to give me a job back and have the faith in me after five generations of family wine-making,” he says.

Rikard-Bell did vintages in 2009 and 2010 before heading to Orange, where he planned to buy winemaker Murray Smith’s operation Canobolas-Smith. When the deal fell over (“It was just a business decision, Murray and I are still fine”), he set up his contract business with Svenson before making his own first Rikard vintage – a pinot – in 2015. “I had been making a barrel each year since 2012 that was drunk by family and friends but the first commercial vintage was 2015 and we didn’t release that until the 2016 vintage was ready so we had a ‘range’,” he says with a grin.

Rikard-Bell’s winemaking philosophy focuses on highlighting flavour, complexity, balance, texture and length. It’s all about gentleness – hand-picking grapes, minimal intervention, a bit “old world”, ventures the man behind the wine.

William is also a Chief Steward for Wine Tasting at the Orange Wine Show.

Chair of the 2018 Orange Wine Show committee Justin Byrne and Chief Steward William Rikard-Bell
(Source: Central Western Daily)

2018: Named one of the Top 50 Young Guns of Wine

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