Who buys the wine?
Our chief wine buyer, David Farmer, now lives in the Barossa Valley. This provides our customers an advantage. To buy well today you have to be right where the vineyards and wineries are. Let us illustrate this with two examples. Vintage 2004 and 2005 in the Barossa Valley left many tonnes of cabernet sauvignon not harvested because there were no buyers at a price above the cost of picking. This creates opportunities if you are on the spot. And are you aware that there has been an explosion of small grower-winemakers who have broken free of the big company distribution system. Small parcels of the choice fruit from their vineyards they now keep for themselves. The French have a term for them, ‘garagistes’, literally those who make tiny amounts of wine in the garage. Not home bottlers but graduates of our wine universities. This is exciting wine and you need to know about it. It has astonished us how rapidly this movement is spreading. By living in the Barossa Valley we have easy access
