For our first vintage ‘Down under’ we couldn’t have wished for a better run up to the harvest. With the unusually cool summer and gentle autumn, the Barossa and Eden Valleys have experienced one of their mildest and best quality vintages. Moderate daytime temperatures went over 40°C only several times during the summer and January rains topped up the sub-soil moisture levels.

The year had started in a completely different way . At the beginning we had nothing –no vines, no equipment – nothing. Peter Smith painstakingly contacted, cajoled intermediaries into locating the kind of vines that we wanted to acquire for the wines – Exile and Émigré. The Barossa has traditionally separated the role of winemaker from grower, and therefore many serious wines are made by companies who do not own the vines that make their wines famous. The mission was, in principle, simple – find the extremely old vines for which the Barossa is famous and, subject to the vineyard being a prior constituent of a recognised wine, buy them.

It took the whole year to accumulate four blocks – ‘Lange’ next to the town of Nurioopta, ‘Schiller’ near Light Pass (where the winery is sited), ‘Vinegrove’ near Greenock, and ‘Gunyah’ in the Eden Valley. The provenance of the blocks is amazing, with a number being dry grown – in the case of ‘Lange’, back to the 1800’s.

In January we shipped the complete winery equipment over from Bordeaux – everything from wooden vats down to pipettes. Meeting local resistance to our building of the winery we decamped to temporary sanctuary five kilometres up the road. All blocks had been cropped at over twice what we wanted to apply to the making of Exile and Émigré; so two runs of green harvesting were done to achieve cropping levels below one tonnes/per acre.

The harvest started on the 3rd April, and was safely gathered in by the 17th April. The Shiraz and Mourvedre were everything they should be but the Grenache required further concentration through a ‘saignée’. Due to the mild year we were able to make all wines with no unnatural adjustments, and therefore the wines are pure in a European sense.

The accepted feeling is that the vintage 2002 will have the intensity and fruit definition of the great 1998 vintage, with it’s combination of ripeness and balanced acidity, but with perhaps a more elegant structure due to the milder year.

All in all, a great start for a new company.