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!

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.

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!

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!

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.