Thistledown Wine Company
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We deliver Australia wide.  Free shipping on 12 or more bottles (otherwise $15).     

THE STORY

The Story

Thistledown Wine Company work with a unique blend of unrivalled fruit sources and the experience of both the New and the Old Worlds, lent by our 2 Masters of Wine. We craft wine of subtlety, texture and detail – wines a long way down the path to perfect balance. 


Best known as one of the leaders of the contemporary Grenache movement, Thistledown Wines make small batch Grenache, Shiraz and Chardonnay from McLaren Vale, Barossa Valley and the Adelaide Hills. Alongside Wild & Wilder Wines, benchmark regional varietals and Mediterranean blends, and Millions Suns, sustainably certified wines from The Riverland, we produce world class wines with quality, value and sustainability at their core.

Grenache

It's no secret that we're obsessed with Grenache, particularly the old vine, dry grown stuff in McLaren Vale and Barossa. 

Maybe it's the years travelling round Spain but Grenache in all its guises pretty much courses through our veins. We've begun assembling a collection of some of the best Grenache vineyards in Australia with the intention of becoming the authority on Australian Grenache.
SHOP GRENACHE

Grenache

It's no secret that we're obsessed with Grenache, particularly the old vine, dry grown stuff in McLaren Vale and Barossa. 

Maybe it's the years travelling round Spain but Grenache in all its guises pretty much courses through our veins. We've begun assembling a collection of some of the best Grenache vineyards in Australia with the intention of becoming the authority on Australian Grenache.
SHOP GRENACHE

We love

Hand-making delicious, joyful wines – all sourced from amazing vineyard sites in the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale and Adelaide Hills. It's no secret that our real love is Grenache!

We make

Small batch, hand-made wines from sites that we believe are special. We pick fruit on the way up rather than the way down so that we can do as little as possible to make the best wine. We're slowly gathering the very best selection of Grenache sites in Australia.

We support

Those who care for these great sites and amazing vineyard resources. We ensure that all of our relationships are profitable ones – in the broadest sense of the word.
EXPLORE REGIONS

We love

Experimenting and trialling from our base in the beautiful Adelaide Hills, working on the basis that if we haven’t made one mistake each vintage, we haven’t been trying hard enough!

We craft

We are perfectly set up to deal with the multitude of small batches that we receive. 
We pick fruit on the way up rather than the way down so that we can do as little as possible to make the best wine. We're slowly gathering the very best selection of Grenache sites in Australia.

We support

We source our fruit from many of the best sites in the iconic regions of South Australia. We work closely with growers who, like us, want to see the character of their vineyard as faithfully portrayed in bottle as possible. Over a period of time, we have gained access to sites that we only dreamed of in the early days, and feel privileged to be able to craft wines from Australia’s viticultural history.
EXPLORE REGIONS

Thistledown's approach to winemaking is simple. 

We work with remarkable sites, so our job is to coax that fruit in to bottle, retaining as much of that energy and personality as possible. Low yielding sites, hand-picked a little earlier. 

In the winery, the small batches are allowed to ferment spontaneously, we use minimal extraction, love concrete fermenters and enjoy the detail that oak can bring, but not the dominating flavour.
 
We started with a vision to produce wines that are definitively "of their place" and though that sounds a bit pretentious its just about making wines that we feel reflect the personality of the place, the growers and of course us.
 
We love wines with life, vibrancy of fruit, texture, tension and drinking appeal. In order to achieve this, we only buy very high quality grapes from growers who share our vision and are prepared to work with us to deliver pristine fruit to the winery.
 
It's become the norm in some regions to give the grapes extended hang time and to look for fruit sweetness and ripe flavours in the vineyard. We prefer to work with fruit that still has great balance of sweetness, acidity and tannin - fruit that we pick "on the way up rather than on the way down". 
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