Winemaking
Andrew grew up surrounded by the wines of Rutherglen. Not only the wines of All Saints, then owned by the family, but other remarkable wines of the region. He remembers the wines made by the Burgoyne family at Mount Ophir Estate. “They were London wine merchants,” he says. “They made big wines with a lot of oak for export.” The wines would be shipped to London over the equator without refrigeration. The broad, rich tannin from the oak held the structure of the wine as it passed through the equatorial heat. Andrew’s palate was also informed by the wines made by Baileys of Glenrowan. The big, punchy Durif, with its assertive tannins, lingering savoury finish punctuated by floral notes, really made an impression on him.
Andrew is renowned for his big, bold, and delicious red wines. His use of French and American oak creates a seamless story of integrated fruit and wood tannin on the palate. This overt style of winemaking always starts with him carefully coaxing the fruit in the vineyard to full flavour ripeness through the painstaking process of fruit thinning and canopy management throughout the season. His in-depth understanding of yeasts sees him able to ferment big wines with an immaculately clean finish. Amy works side by side with him sharing his encyclopaedic knowledge of their library-like collection of oak barrels from which they carefully blend wines of the same variety, made from grapes harvested from different pockets in the different vineyards. The resulting wines are the culmination of generations of winemaking experience, working with grapes from vines growing in unique soil in one of Australia’s most historic and globally recognised wine regions.