Delamere Between fly fishing for trout and wine tasting in the Tasmanian Wine Show and cellar doors over a 50-year span, I've come to know Tasmania pretty well. Were it not for the intrusion of a corporate law practice I fancy I might have spent...

With the wisdom of hindsight, Seppelt's decision to establish a vineyard in Henty in 1965 is fact bordering on fiction. According to Dr John Gladstones it is the coolest region in Australia, the Tasmanian East Coast next coolest. It is a region...

When starting a new winery from the ground up a key decision is whether it should include its own vineyard or rely on contract-grown grapes. Similar decisions include part own-vineyard, part contract-grown, or whether to postpone a final choice for...

Warren Randall, owner of Seppeltsfield, must have some of the Seppelt family DNA in his blood. Joseph Seppelt was only 20 when he inherited the family's cigar and liquor business in Silesia, and with wife Johanna, three children and 13 neighbouring...

The present Holm Oak property in Tasmania's Tamar Valley gained its name from a planting of oak trees in the 1930s, intended to provide oak for tennis racquets. It came to nothing, and 50 years later 2ha of cabernet sauvignon and 0.4ha of pinot...

Talk about the odd couple. I cannot imagine how it would be possible to come up with two varieties as radically different as Hunter Valley semillon and Central Otago pinot noir. They are grown and made in two countries thousands of kilometres apart...

The annual challenge and the opportunity that confronts most winemakers worth the name explains why each accepts the gruelling vintage hours, and the inadequate pay. The challenge is to make greater wines than ever before, and if the growing season...

For upwards of 40 years I visited Burgundy wearing various hats: wine buyer for others and myself; vintage winemaker; part owner of a house in Monthelie (just south of the city of Beaune); and wine writer across most mediums. To say it is part of...

I am forever driven by Mick Knappstein's aphorism that there are only two sorts of people: those who were born in Clare, and those who wish they were born in Clare. In 1985 I self-published a hardback book on its history, vignerons and wines, and...

There is something supernatural about growing grapes and making wine that makes doctors, lawyers, and suits of all kinds invest in an ever-deepening financial black hole, and a circle of friends that can't always be relied on to fill urgent tasks...