Wayne and Suzi of Smallfry were selling their Cabernet grapes, but decided in the cool vintage of 2022 to keep them and make a full-bodied red.

This meaty number was the result. A burst of blackberry and blackcurrant fruit flavours. Ten months in oak helped round out the tannins. Perfect with slow cooked stews, game or lamb.

Wayne Ahrens and Suzi Hilder wanted to make small batch, low intervention wine, without using systemic chemicals. So they quit their secure jobs with large wine companies and founded Smallfry Wines, initially planting a site from local seedlings in Eden Valley between 1994 and 1998.

In 2007 they bought an 18 hectare estate with old, ungrafted, biodynamic vines in Vine Vale, Barossa, which had been tended for the previous 52 harvests by Ken Schliebs, and been in Ken’s family since the 1850s.