Thistledown Wine Company
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THE STORY

The Story

Thistledown was founded in 2010 by two Masters of Wine, Giles Cooke and Fergal Tynan, whose vision was to craft wines of precision, elegance and energy. Wines that not only faithfully expressed the sites from which the fruit was grown but challenged the accepted norms of Australian wine at the time.

 

Thistledown craft elegant, energetic and detailed Grenache, Chardonnay from the Adelaide Hills and Eden Valley, and contemporary style Shiraz from McLaren Vale, Eden Valley and Barossa.


Today, Thistledown is a Halliday Wine Companion 5 red star winery, a Real Review Top Winery of Australia and a certified member of Sustainable Winegrowing Australia (SWA). We consistently receive very high scores and praise from the world’s most respected wine writers and publications. We are demonstrating that South Australian wine is truly world class - deserving its place on the finest tables and shelves, and in cellars across the world.


With Giles Cooke MW responsible for winemaking, his focus on old vines, “picking on-the-way-up”, whole bunch inclusion and wild ferments, has enabled him to faithfully translate site into bottle. The aim is to make wines of great purity, precision and energy rather than a reliance on power, alcohol or oak.

The Story

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 Grenache fanatics!

Thistledown belongs to a small group of wineries leading the contemporary grenache movement in Australia, crafting world class versions with fruit from McLaren Vale and Barossa’s Eden Valley. Thistledown is the only winery to be awarded the Halliday Wine Companion Grenache of the Year Award twice.

Maybe it's the years travelling round Spain but Grenache in all its guises pretty much courses through our veins. We've assembled a collection of some of the best Grenache vineyards in Australia and have become an 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 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

A simple approach to winemaking

Our job is to coax fruit from remarkable sites into bottle, retaining as much of it's energy and personality as possible. Low yielding sites, hand-picked 'on the way up'. 

Our aim at Thistledown is to make wine of great purity, precision and energy. We're not here to impress with size, weight, alcohol or oak. As our name suggests, our wines may appear robust on the surface but we seek deep flavours and complexity that can be peeled back, layer by layer.

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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