Our vineyards sit on some of the oldest and unchanged viticultural soils on the planet.
The Barossa Valley, Eden Valley and Adelaide Hills are some of the most geologically stable regions on earth.
Their basic architecture was created as part of the Adelaide Geosyncline, formed 500 to 900 million years ago – in contrast, the Himalayas were only starting to emerge 10 million years ago.
A time-lapse photograph of our planet over the past 500 million years would show continents speeding around the globe and crashing into each other. Mountains would burst up from the landmass only to quickly erode away to nothing. Yet our part of South Australia would remain still, only gradually rounding from the wind, water and at times ice.
What does this history mean for our single-vineyard wines?
A lot can happen in a million years, let alone 900 million. Movements in the soil from wind, rain, ice, faulting and folding have created mixtures of gravel, sand, clay, loam, silt and solid rock, often all within the same soil profile.
From these ancient and diverse soils, we have crafted our wines, each with its own individual and unique spirit of place.
That's why Many of our labels feature a beautifully detailed soil photograph.
Each close-up shot reveals the soil from that wine's particular vineyard. We believe the soil is part of the wine's story and also speaks of place – each photo shows the huge diversity in soil profile between blocks, even those within the same region.
We would like to thank the late Archie McArthur for taking the incredibly detailed soil photographs that appear on almost all of our labels. And a huge thanks, too, to Tom Ross of Brilliant Creek for photographing our Broderick Pinot Noir and Whisson Lake Pinot Noir.