Winery

The winery occupies the old Convent building in Basket Range, a building with a lineage. Some of the most quietly important winemaking in the Adelaide Hills has moved through its walls, and Jean-Baptiste considers that history not as a credential but as a standard. The room has expectations. Part of the work is meeting them.

Everything is done by hand, by one winemaker making every decision. Fruit arrives from the vineyards and leaves in the bottle, and everything that happens between those two points happens here, under one roof. There is no de-stemming. Depending on the grape variety and the conditions of the year, fruit is either whole-bunch pressed or left on skin. Fermentation is surrendered entirely to wild yeasts, always monitored, never forced. Aging happens predominantly in French oak, with time in tank playing an equal role in the elevage of each wine. Nothing enters the wine beyond what the fruit and the wild ferment offer of their own accord.

Bottling on site is the decision that admits no compromise. Wines made with this little addition are sensitive by nature: the act of moving them off site, exposing them to the temperature variations of transport and the mechanical stress of outside equipment, is the act of undoing months of careful attention in a single afternoon. Bottling at the winery allows for flexibility and the precision that the quality of the wine demands. His investment in his own bottling line is what gives him sovereignty over the final moment. For wines built to keep for a decade or more, that final hour is as consequential as any other in the process.

The decisions are made wine by wine, vintage by vintage, with no fixed formula and no formula that could be fixed: each year presents a different set of conditions, and the winemaker's job is to read them rather than correct them.