South Australia Archives - Young Gun of Wine

2023 Yelland & Papps ‘Vin de Soif’

A Barossa red with a French name that drinks like a pinot noir? Mais oui. This bright, crunchy blend of three Mediterranean varieties is a dangerously drinkable departure from the Barossa norm.

Scott McGarry

In ancient Rome, the phrase Nil caput quoerere – ‘to search for the source of the Nile’ – was used as an idiom to describe attempting the impossible. While Scott McGarry’s wines under the Source of the Nile label don’t strictly speaking attempt the impossible, there is definitely a hint of the Quixotic about this project, which sees McGarry commute from his home in northern New South Wales to the Barossa Valley every year for vintage, where he makes wine from fruit sourced from all over Australia. Over two releases, each consisting of a minuscule three cuvées, McGarry has established himself as one of Australia’s most interesting natural/lo-fi winemakers. Largely self-taught – with some help along the way from Jilly Wines’ Jared Dixon – McGarry’s wines speak of the wild magic that can happen when quality fruit meets an untamed and somewhat untrained maker.

Paul Thomas

Starting a new wine project in a region as storied as the Barossa Valley means taking a position in relation to its traditions. For most winemakers, the choice is between tearing up the region’s rulebook and scandalising the traditionalists – as a cohort of young vignerons did in the Barossa roughly a decade ago – or leaning in to the region’s reputation. But there is a third way: honouring history and tradition, while respectfully updating the elements that no longer resonate with the general public. It’s a tough needle to thread, but Paul Thomas’s Barossa project Tribus does so with aplomb. Thomas crafts a tight lineup of approachable wines from Barossa stalwarts shiraz, grenache, and mataro, with a little cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc thrown in for good measure, alongside a riesling from the Watervale subregion of the nearby Clare Valley.

Ansel Ashby

Everyone loves a comeback story, and with Pare Wine, Ansel Ashby is proving himself to be the Rocky Balboa of the South Australian wine scene. After having to shutter his first label, Gatch Wines, Ashby has returned with Pare – a new label in collaboration with wine merchant Andrew Williams. As the name suggests, Pare’s approach is all about minimalism, with their first release consisting of a compact collection of three single-site wines – two grenaches and a chardonnay –drawn from Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale. Winemaking is minimal-intervention, allowing the fruit and terroir to speak clearly. With Pare, Ashby is proving that less is definitely more.

Mitchell Sokolin

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an American sommelier and French intellectual Gilles Deleuze walk into a natural wine bar … Sommelier-turned-winemaker Mitchell Sokolin channels his formidable intellect and love of silly puns into his Eleven Sons label. Using fruit sourced from various vineyards across South Australia’s broader Limestone Cost region – with some Pyrenees touriga nacional thrown in the mix, too – Sokolin crafts a tight lineup of wines based on chardonnay, semillon, pinot noir, pinot gris, and syrah, with a grüner veltliner on the way, plus a savagnin for his collaborative label with Shane Michael, Limestone Cowboy. Made using methods from “the natural playbook”, as he puts it – spontaneous ferments, no additions beyond a touch of sulphur at bottling, no new oak – with a cheerful disregard for traditional approaches to any given variety, the Eleven Sons range is as thought-provoking as it is drinkable.

Matthew Large

It takes some stones to leave a gig like senior winemaker at a company as renowned as Shaw + Smith, but that’s just what Matt Large did towards the end of 2024 in order to focus fully on what had until then been his side-project, Praeter. What started as a small side-hustle in 2018 to explore Large’s love of Nebbiolo has now blossomed into a full-time proposition, with Large jetting between Austraia and Italy to produce a bijou collection of wines – two single-site nebbiolos, another fortified and aromatised nebbiolo, an Italian red blend, and a pecorino, with a further single-site nebbiolo set for release later this year. Large has also taken on the management of two blocks of vines in the Adelaide Hills – pinot noir and chardonnay – which will become part of the Praeter stable with the 2025 vintage. Drawing on a wealth of international experience, Large makes wines that show his ability to subtly interpret the diverse terroirs of the Adelaide Hills, the Pyrenees, and Italy’s Langhe region.

Marcell Kustos

Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to help articulate what makes something special – and Marcell Kustos of Lvdo Wines (pronounced ‘ludo’) has more than enough fresh angles from which to approach the subject of Australian wine. Born in Hungary to a family of viticulturists and winemakers, his formal education is in food technology and wine science, and his professional background is as a sommelier and wine director at some of Australia’s most lauded fine dining destinations (including Restaurant Botanic and Penfolds Magill Estate). He brings these perspectives to bear in the making of his Lvdo Wines label – a collection of four core wines (white, red, rosé and orange/amber) and some one-off project wines that pay homage to the great wines of Australia, with an outsider’s twist. Equally at home analysing Brix levels in must as he is selling his wines to the restaurant trade, Lvdo Wines demonstrates that Kustos is an unlikely renaissance man with new and interesting things to say about Australian wine.

Lauren Hansen

A lot of winemakers who grow up in wine-growing regions romanticise their old stomping grounds, and often deliberately work towards returning to their home regions when starting their own labels. Not so much Lauren Hansen, who grew up in the Limestone Coast region and sought to escape it – only to find that her career drew her back. Hansen’s own label, Bloomfield, celebrates the Limestone Coast through a mix of unusual varieties – currently grüner veltliner, petit verdot, and mencía – and allows her opportunities for unfettered winemaking expression. With one Bloomfield release under her belt, Hansen’s just getting started, but her enthusiasm for her project is undeniable.

2023 Yelland & Papps ‘Vin de Soif’ Barossa Valley
A Barossa red with a French name that drinks like a pinot noir? Mais oui. This bright, crunchy blend of three Mediterranean varieties is a dangerously drinkable departure from the Barossa norm.