I’ve been with RedHeads officially for just under 18 months, and in that time, I think the company has seen the biggest change that it’s had in its whole existence from when it started in 2002. RedHeads has always been in little back sheds and the motto was always ‘Beg, borrow and…not steal, but make-do, wing it and get through’. And that was fine when it was small, but now because we’re making more wines and we’ve got longer-term relationships with our growers and we’re exporting to more countries around the world, RedHeads has had to mature and grow up – in a good way! We now know people like our wines, so we can really commit and lock things in.

Part of my job brief when I started was that we’re building a 500-tonne winery that can really help us make premium wines, but then also grow the super-premium, high-end, iconic and exclusive wines. For us to do that we need a facility where we’ve got full control. In the past when we’ve rented space off friends and growers, it’s worked well but we’ve been restricted by their time requirements, their facilities and their area. Now we’ve got our own home, we can control how we do everything, and do things our way. It allows us to get back to being a home for lots of young winemakers, and helps us focus on the winemaking. We’ve gone back to the original RedHeads plan of bringing in new winemakers so they can experiment and try new things, and we can hopefully make some pretty cool new wines.

When I started, we were in the back of a little shed in Tanunda. The business there had changed hands and we ended up renting off a big corporate company who wanted to control everything, so that sent up some red flags and told us it was time to get out of there.

So where we are now: we’ve got a bunch of people together in our own shed, versus other people’s sheds! Tony has allowed us to go to the next step, and really put our roots down in the Barossa. We now own in total 8 hectares of vineyard in the Barossa that surround our winery and our cellar door, and we’re on Angaston Road, which come with very high exposure – we’ve got Penfold’s down the road in one direction, and in the other direction we’ve got Saltram’s and Yalumba, so we’re right in the heart of the Barossa, not out in whoop whoop, which is very cool!

What’s also very cool about our new winery is that because we started from scratch, we’ve been able to build it with sustainability in mind. We’ve got 50 kilowatts of solar panels on the roof, which means that during the 10-11 months of the year when we’re not doing vintage all of our power will come from solar. During vintage, just while we’re getting an understanding of how much power we use, most of our power will come from solar and we’ll rely on the grid just a little bit to top us up until we’re ready to put batteries in in about 6-12 months. Then we’ll go completely isolated off-grid, so we’ll be, as far as energy goes, generating all our electricity from our solar panels. We’ve also developed our waste water system from scratch, which means we recycle all of the winery’s washdown water, and it gets used on all our vineyards. So…we recycle our water, we create our own electricity, and we’re a pretty sustainable winery – if not one of the most sustainable wineries in Australia. We will also be looking to take some organic or biodynamic fruits in, so I’d like to think we could be one of the leaders in the region and in the state working towards being carbon neutral. It’s an amazing opportunity to be part of, and so far so good! Everything seems to be on track.

We’re seeing results in our vineyards too. The quality of the fruit is really good, and we’re investing in the vineyard to take it to the next level. We’re already seeing those results – the vineyard is looking really good, and the fruit’s looking really good. So that keeps me out of trouble!

I grew up in the north east of Victoria, where my parents have got vineyards. They planted vineyards in the late 80’s some of which are now officially the oldest vineyards in the Strathbogie Ranges. To be honest, when I was younger, I wasn’t overly keen to be a winemaker, especially when your parents are dragging you out there to work on the property. But it clocked when I was about 16 or 17 that I wanted to go down that path. So, I finished high school and went up to Charles Sturt University and did my winemaking degree up there. But I did it part time, so whilst studying I was travelling around the country working vintages in different regions in different wineries. I’ve worked in Victoria doing vintage, I’ve worked in Margaret River, went up and did vintage in the Hunter Valley, and then I came over to the Barossa to do one vintage and then have been here ever since! So that kind of didn’t go to plan…but I think it worked out really well.

Since coming to the Barossa, I started as assistant winemaker, and then moved up to operations, and then into a winemaking role. At that time, the business I was working for owned a cool climate premium winery in the Adelaide Hills, so I ended up being fortunate enough to get the head winemaker’s gig for Nepenthe, where I was for 5 years. From there I jumped over and worked as a senior red wine maker for Pernod Ricard in the Barossa for about 15 months. Although it was an interesting role, when this job came up it was stupid to not apply for! And it’s been amazing, because I’m involved in everything from vineyards through to winemaking through to making sure the solar panels work properly, through to keeping the gardener on track! Every facet from vineyard through to winemaking through to the marketing side. That’s what’s allowing us to have that full control and set ourselves up to be sustainable and focus on premium wines.

I’ve done vintages overseas as well. I went and worked in California, in the Napa Valley, in 2008. And in 2010 I went and worked in Jura in France, and then in 2014 I went to Germany and did vintage just outside Frankfurt. Doing vintages overseas is handy when it comes to making wine!

Without being cheeky, it’s a good sign if a winemaker is keen to go and learn about wine in different countries, because you see things that you don’t see here in Australia. Some things aren’t much use, but you learn some really valuable lessons as well. It’s just good to see the noble varieties – especially going to France. Everything in Australia at some point came from France or Italy or Spain, so yes we’ve got some of the oldest vines in the world due to disease outbreaks in Europe…but all the different grape varieties originated from Europe. It’s the home of wine! So it’s good for a young Australian winemaker to get over there and learn and see and experience it. The more you see the more you learn.

When you’re a junior coming up, you realise some of the people you look up to as you grow through the ranks might be better at marketing than they are at winemaking! So you change your opinion a bit. But when I was in France, the winemaker over there ran a similar sized winery to what we’re doing here at RedHeads, and he oversaw everything from the vineyards through to the picking and everything that happened in the winery through to the box. Just seeing the quality of wines that were coming out the other end, and the passion he was putting into them, that’s my inspiration for making decisions at the winery. Some of those decisions are largely around things I learnt when I worked with him. I learned s lot from him.

I think you learn a lot from every winemaker you work with, some of which you’ll take forward into your own practices and some you’ll leave behind. I worked with a guy called Murray Leake who is a really well-respected viticulturalist in the Adelaide Hills. He and I used to work together at Nepenthe, and I learnt a lot from him. When I was a younger winemaker he spent a lot of time in the vineyard teaching me about when to pick a fruit and things to be aware of. He was pretty influential in my winemaking because he showed me a different perspective of vineyards, a viticulturalist’s perspective rather than a winemaker’s one.

Both. I think there’s some science, some things you can’t ignore, otherwise you end up with vinegar! So that’s the science side of it – you can only be ‘hands off’ to a certain extent. You still need to keep your eye on the prize because otherwise you end up with vinegar. The natural process of picking grapes and then fermenting them will naturally just turn into vinegar if you don’t keep an eye on it. So winemaking is about controlling that process and ensuring that you come out with a really nice product at the other end. That would be the science side. The art is that what makes wine so interesting and amazing is that no two wines are the same. Every vineyard is a bit different, and how winemakers handle the fruit into the winery and how they work with it is different, the different barrels they choose…that’s where you start falling into the area of art, because it’s more people’s individual perception and take on how they think the wine should be as a finished product. That’s the arty, more passionate side of winemaking.

The philosophy behind the labels is to find special little parcels that aren’t getting the opportunities to be looked after properly. We want to find these single vineyard blocks, pick them and look after them, and make wines that are essentially better than our neighbours’. We love working with these individual parcels from growers that are passionate, who really want to see their fruit go into smaller wineries where it gets looked after by the winemaker. They can drop in and say hello, taste their fruit in a wine. That connection with the growers is key for RedHeads in making premium wines. The problem with the industry is that when you get to the bigger end of town, the winemakers don’t have a clue where the fruit actually came from – it’s just picked and put in a big tank. Whereas at RedHeads, the winemaker is out walking the rows with the grower, working out when they’re going to pick it, literally delivering the beans to the vineyard. We want to make sure we can tell the story, and keep track of the story, of a particular fruit, where it came from, what makes it special and why we decided to bring it into the winery.

Another thing with RedHeads is a big part of our direction is to be plain with things that are bit left-field, eg. alternative varieties that in their mother country might be really popular but in Australia they’re a bit unknown, that we believe we can make some really good wine out of. We look for the alternative Italian and Spanish varietals, where there’s only a couple of small plantings in the region that we have to fight other wineries for! Things like Touriga…there’s only 3 vineyards in the Barossa that we’re aware of that have small amounts of Touriga. Little varieties like that is what makes RedHeads more interesting than some of the other bigger, more stock-standard brands. We’re also not afraid to make untraditional blends, for example we’ve got our Spanish wine, Vin’atus, which is Tempranillo, Grenache and Graciano, then we have our R’dotto Royale that’s made up of five Italian grape varieties – I’m pretty sure there’s nobody else doing that blend in Australia. We’re doing things like this because the varieties work really well together, but most other wineries wouldn’t dare put them together because it’s a bit too left-field.

At the end of the day we want to challenge some of the big guys down the road. Why should Penfolds have the name of making the best wines when they’re owned by a big corporation?

At the moment it’s looking really good! Being a winemaker I’m always hesitant to say too much until we’ve got the fruit in the winery… We’ve could have torrential rain like Queensland tomorrow and the wheels could fall off vintage very quickly! But that’s not forecast thankfully. At the moment we’re on track to have a really smart vintage. Crops are a bit on the lower end, which is good – better than having over-cropped vineyards – which will probably result in us being a bit short on supply. But if we’re making better wine that’s not a bad thing. The berries are smaller, they haven’t filled out because it’s been quiet hot, so we’re expecting the juice to skin ratio to be lower, meaning we’ll have more intense, concentrated wines.

It’s crazy! The amount of cool new wines coming out and people trying and pushing the boundaries (pretty much what RedHeads was doing back in the early 2000’s) has exploded. All the little wine bars that are willing to try new small brands that nobody’s heard of – it’s fantastic. There are lots of cool little places popping up, but we I suppose have the advantage of our brand new winery. So some of these little places are back where we were doing that ‘beg, borrow, steal’ malarkey, so it’s nice to be a bit ahead of the curve! The new generation that’s come through the industry has kind of thrown the rulebook out and have strayed away from just making Cabernet, Merlot and Shiraz. People aren’t afraid to try alternate varieties and put a twist on how they’re making them. That’s not to say all wines are good – there are some terrible wines out there! But there’s also some really interesting and well-made wines. As far as consumers go, there’s lots of amazing wines out there at the moment. I remember when I was younger going through Uni, it was just a sea of Cab Merlot and Merlot Cabernet blends that were all boring and tasted the same! So I think the Australian wine industry is in a really exciting phase. In the Barossa, we’re a great example of a younger newer team trying new things. But the Adelaide Hills is another good example of that – because it’s a young region and it doesn’t have that multi-generational mentality holding it back. It’s all first-generation or maybe second-generation winemakers who are coming in going ‘No one’s done this before, so there’s no one stopping us now. We don’t have to make Pinot this way or Shiraz that way!’ They are trialling and experimenting. Wine is riding the same wave s craft beer, which has gone crazy, and it’s awesome if you’re a young winemaker coming in. Dare I say it, if you’re an old winemaker you’re probably struggling to fit in!

I’m a bit of a sucker for Chardonnay and Pinot! We’re not doing much of that with RedHeads at the moment (but we might try to do a little bit more of that in the future because my background when I worked in the Adelaide Hills was high end Chardonnay and Pinot). But yes, whenever I’m overseas I always try and push my luck and bring as much Pinot and Chardonnay as I can back in my luggage and try and get through customs!

Depends on how good the island was! It might be a bottle of Champagne!

Does saying ‘build a winery’ count? That’s a tough question to answer because I’ve literally been working on this every day for the past 4 months! I’d love to see my wife, but I’ve barely been home. But when it’s a bit quieter we do tend to drink a little bit more wine, and in my spare time I like going to the beach, and hang out with my kids, and potter around in the garden. We’ve got lots of veggies, and I’ve even got a little vineyard nursery in my backyard so that keeps me out of trouble. Like most people I like catching up with friends, going out for dinner, going to restaurants and just taking it easy.

They’re three and six. It might not be too early! Max, my six-year-old, has got a very good nose. He can pick the varieties. He’s allowed to smell the glasses, and he can tell the difference between Pinot and Cabernet which is quite good.

Not since my Uni days! But it was pretty important in those days. It’s all about making connections, because the people you go through Uni with become significant people at other wineries as you go through your career, and Wheel of Goon was an important bonding experience!

That’s a tricky one! I kind of like winemaking a lot! I do like designing. I reckon I’d be a decent architect, because I designed the winery here and I thoroughly enjoyed that. Perhaps I could design a winery for someone else, and drink their wine!

Duck done properly with Pinot. There’s a cool little French restaurant in Adelaide, and another one in Melbourne, they both do it really well. I always try and visit whenever I’m in those cities.

This is kind of embarrassing… I’ve been to burgundy for about 48 hours, and I keep promising myself I’ll go back there for about 2 weeks. That would be ideal for me – just settle in in Burgundy for 2 weeks and just wander around trying as much wine as I could.

Are the following, in your opinion, overrated or underrated?

• Chardonnay: underrated
• Sparkling Shiraz: most are overrated, proper méthode champenoise is underrated
• Married at First Sight: never seen it! I work too much!
• Cricket: overrated (there’s been a lot on TV at the moment)
• Cocktails: underrated, a well-made cocktail is worth the effort
• Netflix: underrated, because I work a lot
• Smashed avo on toast: amazing marketing! I love both, but overrated for the price
• Podcasts: underrated! They make sense, but I don’t have time to listen
• The gym: underrated, because the gym is my meditative unwind time
• Camping: underrated, I wish I had more time
• Fine dining: underrated, I wish I did more!