We champion Australian culture with playful, sustainable wines crafted from drought-resistant grapes for easy enjoyment and a fresh perspective on Australian wine.

Our Goals

  • Make a meaningful contribution to the world of wine.
  • Help Australia to be culturally relevant amongst our peers.
  • Inspire others to be as transparent as we are about our sustainability endeavours.

— Since 2019

Third-Party Verified

Don't take our word for it: B Corp have a microscope on everything we do.

— 2023 Figures

Renewable Powered

Our winery, office & warehouse facilities are mostly solar powered!

— 2023 Figures

Low Water

The grape varieties we love, need only 1/4 the water than the 'usual' varieties.

From Dirt-Floor Beginnings

2012

Bursting with ideas, we managed to find ourselves a tiny spot at the Old Woollen Mills in the Lobethal - in the heart of the northern Adelaide Hills. One year rent-free to sort ourselves out and get on our feet. Half the floor was concrete, the other half, dirt.

2013

Scrimping, saving & heavy auction-trawling managed to garner us enough equipment to ramshackle a winery together. The rest of our savings went to our first fruit, tanks and barrels. Our biggest win? Finding a French Oak Foudre in a salvage yard!

2014

We moved from Lobethal to Gumeracha, further north into the Adelaide Hills - although we were lacking any kind of equipment, or staff to help us. A true family-affair to get Unico off the ground and into wine stores and restaurants around Australia.

2015

Our first bottling line! We managed to find this at a clearing auction and it literally changed our lives (and alleviated a lot of RSI!) enabling us to grow enough to bring on our first team members.

2016

Finally! A place to call our own forever! We managed to negotiate to purchase the Gumeracha property we were renting - it's rundown, ramshackled and leaking (everywhere) - but it's ours. Time to get to work!

2017

People kept visiting us, wanting to say g'day and try the wines - as humbling as that was, we couldn't get any work done...so we decided to open a cellar door and openly welcome one and all to visit!

2018

After a year of planning and carefully dismantling the original 1900s wooden building, we began our next big dream: a new winery!

2019

Big plans seem to take such a long time to come to fruition, but we got to see it each and every day building piece by piece and brick by brick.

2020

Finally, our winery was completed! A place our team can keep warm in winter, cool in summer, and creative all year 'round!

2021

We brought Unico 'to the people' (of Adelaide) - a 5-seater wine bar blending Nintendo & Wine with guest stars each week! It was short-lived, although it served as the first filming studio for our YouTube Channel: Wine For The People.

2022

The next big dream: our own vineyards. The right property came up at the right time - at Forest Range - in the heart of the Adelaide Hills. An old apple orchard on some of the best viticultural dirt in Australia (we think). Time to get to work!

2023

We begin the preparations for incoming plantings of Fiano, Nerello Mascalese, Sangiovese & Grenache! We also get to learn valuable skills: driving tractors, bogging tractors, breaking tractors, and fixing tractors. Basically: we learned about tractors.

2024

We're no longer semi-professional, but are a true winery! Global distribution, a head winemaker, international cellarhands, and a burgeoning vineyard - it's taken 12 years - but we got there!

Who's Who In The Zoo

— Founder

Laura Carter

As CEO, Laura keeps the good ship 'Unico' afloat and prevents us from hitting any obstacles. Oh, and she's a crackin' winemaker to boot!

— Founder

Brendan Carter

The overthinker, everything-nerd, and cultural-obsessive. Brendan keeps the ideas flowing & Laura on her toes.

— Head Winemaker

Caroline Schaub-Williams

The Swiss-native-turned-Aussie, bringing a heart & precision to the cellar that only a Swiss-turned-Aussie possibly could. She also plays a mean AFL game.

— Head Distiller

Mitch Gauvin

Statistics. Logistics. Ballistics. Mitch does it all with a wicked sense of humor. The jump from bartender to head distiller seemed somewhat effortless for him!

— Brand Director (Wine)

Noah Ward

Diehard wine-nerd, Unico fan, and biggest advocate for everything we do. He's been flying the flag since 2017 - you can usually find him globe-trotting with bottles at the ready. Wanna taste?

— Brand Director (Spirits)

Henry Hammersla

Lighting up any room he steps into, usually because he's brandishing some sort of spiritous concotion and a cheeky smile. The biggest advocate for Australian spirits, worldwide.

Curly Questions

Where did you get the funding to do this?

We started super young, 20 years old when we starting thinking & planning - trawling local auction sites and salvage yards. When you're in South Australia, the kind of equipment needed to ramshackle a winery together is eas(ier) to find. We had about $5000 of savings to kick things off and we did so with a business partner, Sam (who threw in the same amount). He's no longer involved, but we're still good mates and he'll forever be a part of our beginning! Love you Sam.

Since then, we heavily invested the returns from the business back into the business. We've been doing that every single year, and living as frugally as possible - along with an immense amount of help from family & friends. For 5 years, we worked 2-3 jobs each, then spent 5 further years in a tiny house next to the winery that we built from cold-room panels (no kidding). It was only after the first 10 years that we managed to find a bank that'd back us to build the new winery (another amazing B-Corp, Beyond Bank) - and that's largely gotten us to here!

Why aren't you organic?

We certainly preference organic grapes and treatments. Though there are only a finite amount of organic vineyards we could source from. Most of our friends are currently sourcing those grapes - although we noticed that the adoption of organics in vineyards, particularly in higher-rainfall areas such as the Adelaide Hills is exceptionally slow. By competing directly with our friends, we don't achieve anything except for limiting each other's business.

We find a more noble path is to create incentives for established growers to convert to organics - that could be via higher prices for grapes (which doesn't work as well as you might think), or promoting varieties that make organics really easy to convert to (like Fiano!). We want more organic vineyards, and we're operating on a 30+ year timeline. That said, organic isn't the answer for what people really want: sustainable & regenerative farming. That's another whole story.

How big is the winery?

Usually when we're asked this, it's about 'how many bottles/cases' we make per year. It gravitates depending on the season, the projects we're planning, and vineyards we're working with. Usually though we craft around 30,000 cases per year. That's not a small amount, but it's not huge either. Sometimes it's bigger and sometimes it's smaller. By the nature of the price we like to see our wines, we do need a bit of scale in what we do - but this gives us some unique challenges. If we can find a way to craft wine as sustainably as possible at this level, it's easily replicated and scaled in much larger wineries than ours - and that means industry-wide change - but only if we can crack the code and share our findings openly!

Do you own your own vineyards?

Sort of! Not really. We purchased 50 acres of apple orchard in Forest Range (heart of the Adelaide Hills) in 2022, and we're gradually working to convert the apples into grapes and working to create a holistic farm in which we hope to welcome one-and-all to visit! We anticipate this to open early 2025!

Outside of this, we work with growers who are willing to take risks in establishing new varieties, and try farming in a different way. It's slow, it's hard, but we have plenty of time. We would have loved to have started with our own vineyard, but they're just really expensive to acquire - and banks don't typically provide loans for agricultural land in Australia...especially to two 20-somethings with a dream!

So you're 'sustainable', are you even making a difference?

That's a toughie! In our opinion, the pinnacle of 'sustainable' is 'permanence' - so we take a pretty hard-lined interpretation to this ambiguous term - although our approach in tackling it is quite open-minded. We're transparent with our attempts to define our impact - you can see on our Sustainability Tracker - although this is only periodically updated (we're working on that!)

We can only make so much of a difference as a small group of people. We're realistic how real change is made at scale: competitive pressure & legislative change. If we could do well-enough that a few very big wineries want to copy what we're doing, then mountains will be moved. If enough mountains are moved, and enough people become successive with this, it'll be protected by legislation. The incentives for big companies aren't enough to warrant broad-scale change. That's why we exist. The critical factor is that we openly share everything we do and encourage others to do the same.

Work For Us!

Wanna Be More Unico?

Do you have a passion for sustainable viticulture and minimal intervention winemaking?

An enthusiasm for approachable and easy-drinking wines?

A desire to make wine accessible and remove pretense from the industry?

An appreciation for unique Aussie terroir and drought-resistant grape varieties?

If you answered yes to any of the above, we wanna know more about you!