Hearing a noise outside, a bearded, athletic man wearing a beanie, multiple layers and a wraparound smile emerges, proffering a hand-shake before motioning to follow him back into the shed.

 William Rikard-Bell has reason to be cheery.

The West Wyalong-raised son of a doctor and pharmacist has been named as one of the Top 50 Young Guns of Wine, though he’s quick to jest and offer a sobering take on the honour. 

“You hear ‘Young Guns’ and you think [the winners] are all young and hip 25-year-olds but they are not – they are all in their mid-30s with kids and mortgages and are just thrilled to have a weekend away and time to sleep in the next day,” he says with a generous laugh.

“It was nice to be included and go to Melbourne … as winemakers you are are on your feet all day and you’re just trashed and we found a little dumpling place in Prahran and drank wine and ate and it’s so nice to be around kindred spirits.”

A second reason for good cheer is the fact Rikard-Bell’s boutique wine label Rikard Wines, based in Nashdale on the outskirts of Orange, recently won over wine godfather James Halliday, who has scored its 2016 Black Label Chardonnay and Black Label Pinot Noir 95 points and its 2016 Shiraz, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay 94 points. 

 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 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 38).

“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.

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’.

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.

“The reason for hand-picking is for the integrity of the fruit, having it in pristine condition … I want the fruit exactly how it looks on the vine and then if I want skin contact I can control how much and for what length of time and in what condition, so not just from sloshing around on the back of a truck,” he says.

He picks fruit at different times to add layers of complexity to his wine, a process he admits is finicky.

“It’s a nightmare, my head is a mess. If I ever fell off the perch this place would come to a standstill, no-one would know what the hell is going on, but my record keeping is good,” he admits when asked how he remembers what has been picked and when.

For the same reasons of adding layers to his wines, he uses wild fermentation, which “adds a degree of risk but also more reward”.

“Commercial yeasts are designed to be efficient to convert sugar to alcohol and give certain aromas and flavours [but] wild yeast is an unknown – they are not that efficient in turning sugar to alcohol so they tend to create a lot of other stuff, it might be alcohol or glycerol based on something bound to something else, but it adds to a different feel in the mouth, a different smell and overall different layers of complexity.”

Just as you get the sense Rikard-Bell could talk for days on end about wine, you also sense he’s not let his past be anything but a fork in the highway.

“I try not to let it affect anything,” he says, adding that the cooler Orange climate is kinder to him than the Hunter because a lack of sweat glands means he can’t self-regulate his temperature.

“I was reckless at first, it was like ‘I have survived this’ and Kimberley had to say ‘Calm the hell down’. It’s very easy to get back into the grind of life and you need a little jolt to remind you that you need to get yourself out of a rut and we all go through low patches.

“By and large [the explosion] was the impetus to get us over the line to have courage to dive in and have a go [at starting a business].”

Rikard-Bell says it has been been easier for him than Kimberley to have conviction that his hobby would pay dividends. “She is taking it on faith, purely from me telling her, which has been the hardest thing, but it’s also been a good thing as she has driven the social marketing and business side of things much better than I would,” he says.

Halliday’s accolades were, says Kimberley, what the couple were hoping for. “You know the wines are good but you still want the reassurance all the same,” she says

Though he misses Hunter semillon and shiraz and the its tight-knit wine community, Rikard-Bell is happy to be building the foundations of a similar culture in the central west.

And the love for wine continues to grow.

“I love the fact that every season is a new challenge, you think you have your head around everything and then suddenly the next vintage comes and it’s different,” he says.

“It’s like the surfer chasing the ultimate wave, you never actually get there, you just see a whole lot of waves.”