In Australia, pinot meunier is grown predominantly for sparkling wine production – picked early, blended away, and rarely seen on a label as a still red. Peacock Vineyard is a deliberate exception. Bande Apart, Moorak Wines and Popplevej all source meunier from Sawyer’s Oakbank site, each making small-batch, minimal-intervention reds that carry the vineyard’s name with quiet confidence. The key distinction is not how the vines are farmed – the same blocks, the same soil health approach – but when the fruit is picked. The meunier’s natural versatility across the ripening window produces strikingly different characters at each stage: sparkling base picked early shows pretty, bright red currants; the rosé window brings spicy watermelon and tomato with a hint of tannin; and the later red wine pick yields sarsaparilla and cola flavours with fine, persistent tannins. “The fruit quality has increased dramatically,” Sawyer says, “and the flavour profiles range from sparkling base pick – pretty, bright, upfront red currants – to dry red – sarsaparilla and cola flavours with beautiful fine tannins.”
That quality is the product of sustained attention to how the vine is managed. Sawyer’s early instinct was to crop low – 6 tonnes per hectare in the first two years – but the vines told a different story. “After two years in the vineyard and cropping our pinot meunier quite low at 6 tonne to the hectare, we realised the vines benefitted from higher cropping and produced better fruit quality,” he says. The vineyard now runs at 12 tonnes per hectare, and the improvement in both quality and flavour definition has been clear. The irrigation program is calibrated to build structure and tannin rather than simply keeping vines alive, with water withheld at specific points in the season for buyers seeking more grip. “After managing the vineyard and working closely with each buyer in recognising what they want out of their fruit,” Sawyer says, “we challenge the watering program to produce wines with bolder tannins for some of the buyers, through watering and holding back on watering at different times in the season.”
The farming shift has been gradual and measurable. Herbicide spraying under-vine stopped four years ago; weeding is now done by hand and with a whipper-snipper attachment, working across the 10 acres twice a year. Pruning canes are mulched back into the mid-rows. A seaweed-based fertiliser is applied in place of synthetic nutrients. A live compost is maintained on-site, brewed into a compost tea and sprayed back onto the vineyard. Boundary weeds have been cleared and replanting with indigenous species – in partnership with the local indigenous council – is underway, aimed at fire protection and attracting beneficial fauna. The irrigation system has been switched to full solar power. “My vision on sustainability within our vineyard is to do regenerative farming as much as possible,” Sawyer says, “and, as a leased property, to return the land to the owners in better condition than how we started with it – from all fronts: soil health, vine health, and flora and fauna within and around the vineyard.”
The ‘aha’ moment came in the third vintage, when a spring pruning targeted at slightly heavier cropping coincided with the first application of homemade compost tea. “The spring pruning was targeted to crop a little heavier than the previous years,” Sawyer recalls. “The ‘aha’ moment came when budburst had started and revealed a potential crop, but also the increase in fauna in the vineyard to aid in the protection of the vines was really apparent.” The bucket test confirms the direction of travel: in the first year, the clay soil was essentially lifeless. By year three, the same test returned 35 worms and abundant other microbials. The 2025 vintage was the biggest and healthiest crop the vineyard has delivered.
Sawyer knows the vineyard intimately – all 2,812 vines of it. The first two years of management involved getting on hands and knees under each vine to remove suckers that had never been trimmed, and then working the vine heads hard to retrain canes for production. An ongoing project of ‘layering’ – taking a cane from an existing vine, running it underground and bringing it up through the soil in an adjacent gap – has seen 200 of the vineyard’s 340 available gaps filled over two years, lifting production from 66 per cent to 96 per cent of the site’s potential. “I know all 2,812 vines intimately,” he says. “My love of chardonnay has increased dramatically working on this site.”
Michael Sawyer came to Peacock with more than 20 years of winemaking across the Rhône Valley, the Willamette Valley, McLaren Vale and the Riverland – a range of reference points that informs both how he farms and how he thinks about what the fruit can become. The Sawyer Wine Co. wines are made with a light hand: small batches, hand-picked, thoughtfully crafted and aimed squarely at expressing the Adelaide Hills terroir without winemaking imposition. Zoe Sawyer is Michael’s partner in the enterprise in every sense, and the label’s identity – its clarity, its energy, its lack of pretension – reflects the values of both. The fumé blanc and chardonnay from the site have drawn attention in their own right; it is the pinot meunier, though, that has made Peacock Vineyard a destination address for a growing circle of Adelaide Hills producers convinced that the Adelaide Hills has something singular to say with a grape that almost everyone else is content to use as an anonymous blending component. They may be right.
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