2014 Powell & Sons Alice Shiraz

Described in 1830 by mineralogist and explorer Johannes Menge as “the cream, the whole cream and nothing but the cream”, the Barossa Valley has been a wine region since 1842. Newly arrived Prussians, Germans and Silesians established vineyards that would ultimately realise the Barossa’s potential as one of the world’s great wine regions. Some of those vines still grow and bear fruit today, yielding wines that stand among the very best in the world.

Dave Powell was just nineteen when he first made wine in the Barossa Valley. After working extensively abroad, building winemaking expertise in Italy, France and North America, Dave returned home to work with Barossa Valley stalwarts Yalumba, Peter Lehmann, Wolf Blass, Saltram and Rockford. Over those ten years Dave developed the personal style that has come to characterise his own unique style of wines.

In 1992, Dave began searching for vineyards to form the foundation of his own label. Knowing that the key to great Barossan wine lay in its ancient vines, he scoured the valley to find promising old vineyards. He found them – original vines a hundred years old or more, dry-grown and planted on their own roots, on the slopes that reflected the ideal Barossan terroir. The rub – they were in a state of complete neglect, overgrown and untended for many years. Indeed the owner of one of the vineyards had planned to uproot the vines and turn the paddock over to grazing. Fortunately Dave managed to convince him otherwise, and spent the coming years in backbreaking toil, using only hand tools, rejuvenating sacred old vines across five sites in the Western Barossa.

On the morning of the 14th of April, 1994, the first Powell wine was born as Dave pressed his first ever tonne of Shiraz, from Marcus Schulz’s vineyard in the Northern Barossa, using his one tonne hand-press. That wasn’t the only Powell to be born that day – Dave’s first son Callum made his entry to the world late that afternoon. Perhaps the timing of his birth sealed Callum’s fate – growing up among the vines and in the winemaking sheds in sunny Marananga on the Valley floor and high, cool Flaxman’s Valley, Callum never imagined he would become anything but a winemaker.

Callum and Dave worked together throughout Callum’s childhood. When Callum finished school, he followed his father’s trail to the Rhone Valley, rediscovering the same techniques and passion that Dave had uncovered more than two decades before. Working under Jean-Louis Chave in Hermitage, Callum began to develop his own unique winemaking style.

It had always been father and sons’ intention to make wine together, and in 2014 they made their dreams reality with the foundation of Powell & Son. Honouring the Barossa and Eden Valleys, and the people who planted the vines almost two hundred years before, Powell & Son wines reflect the vineyard from which they come.