South Australia Archives - Young Gun of Wine

2022 Sven Joschke ‘La Eleanor’ Sangiovese

Think Langhorne Creek is all about big juicy malbecs and mint chocolate–tinged cabernets? This supple, elegant sangiovese from Sven Joschke asks you to think again.

2021 Greenhill Wines Pinot Meunier Blanc de Noir Brut

Sparkling wines made only from pinot meunier are a relative rarity here in Australia – but this elegant, detailed, and delicious wine makes a compelling argument that they should be more common. Roll over, pinot noir – and tell chardonnay the news.

Fabiano Minchella

Fabiano Minchella is a born-and-bred McLaren Vale winemaker whose By Fabiano label makes a case – quietly but with mounting conviction – that the south of Italy belongs in the Vale. Launched from the 2020 vintage, the range spans negroamaro, primitivo, fiano, vermentino, greco, a skin-contact macerato and a rosato, all from estate fruit and all made with a philosophy rooted in Minchella’s extended time working in Basilicata and Puglia. The wines are a grower-maker proposition: the family owns and manages all vineyards, with a purpose-planted Italian-style block on the winery site – seven varieties grown at unusually tight spacing in the Italian tradition – the physical embodiment of the experiment. Southern Italian varieties in McLaren Vale is no longer a novelty; By Fabiano is one of the labels that has done the most to prove it shouldn’t be.

Alexey Doumbouya

Alexey Doumbouya is a winemaker at Yalumba whose path to the Barossa runs through Israel, Argentina, Serbia, Italy, France, South Africa, Hungary and Washington DC before arriving at the University of Adelaide for a Master’s in Viticulture and Oenology. Since joining Yalumba in 2022, he has taken responsibility for a broad portfolio across the Samuel’s Collection and premium ranges – including the Eden Valley Chardonnay, Eden Valley Roussanne and Galway Vintage Shiraz – with the Vat-11 Grenache, sourced from a 58-year-old dry-grown vineyard on the Barossa Valley floor in the Marananga sub-region, his most personal creation, and The Virgilius Viognier, grown in Eden Valley from a vineyard first planted in 1980, a prestigious stewardship he has inherited and is now shaping. The Vat-11, notably, does not undergo malolactic fermentation, a deliberate choice that sets it apart from nearly every other red wine in the Barossa and gives it a brightness and precision that is very much Doumbouya’s signature. Both wines are made with wild fermentation, minimal intervention, and an emphasis on letting the vineyard do the talking.

Tom Morrison

Tom Morrison came to winemaking through a vineyard gate on the Bellarine Peninsula in 2017, and has never quite looked back. Wilkie Wines, launched from the 2021 vintage and made in a small facility on a hill overlooking Bacchus Marsh, is a solo operation drawing fruit from Geelong, Heathcote, Bendigo and the Riverland – a range that spans skin-contact whites, chilled reds, pét-nats and more serious structured wines, unified by a preference for wild fermentation, minimal intervention and a refusal to filter. Every label carries a painting by his cousin Kate Lewis – artwork drawn from shared family life – and the whole project is named for their grandmother, Wilkie. The result is a label with a distinctly personal warmth and a winemaking sensibility that is restless, curious and increasingly confident.

Marcus Torzi

Marcus Torzi was 21 years old and still completing his Bachelor of Viticulture and Oenology at the University of Adelaide when he launched Whispers of Chaos – already making two of the most quietly arresting wines to come out of the Barossa Valley in recent memory. The label debuted in August 2025 from the family farm at Mt McKenzie with two wines: a roussanne, riesling and semillon white blend, and a sangiovese and cabernet sauvignon red. Both are unfined, unfiltered and made with Italian stoneware as the primary maturation vessel. Both have a delicacy and lift that feel like a deliberate, considered answer to the questions the Barossa is currently asking itself. In a region wrestling with its own identity, Torzi’s project is less a debut label than a signpost.

Ashleigh Seymour

Ashleigh Seymour spent more than a decade making wine at Avignonesi – Italy’s largest biodynamic estate in Montepulciano, Tuscany – before Covid, young children and the pull of home brought her back to Australia in 2021. After several years as winemaker at McLaren Vale biodynamic pioneer Paxton Wines, she launched her own label, Vino Selvatico, from the 2023 vintage: two wines, a McLaren Vale grenache and a fiano, made from organically and biodynamically farmed fruit with spontaneous fermentation, minimal sulphur, no fining, and a sensibility shaped by two continents. The name means wild wine. The wines live up to it.

Ollie Bevan

Ollie Bevan is a first-generation winegrower making shiraz and grenache from a small organic (not certified) estate in Blewitt Springs, McLaren Vale – one of the subregion’s most compelling pockets for both varieties. Parea, launched from the 2022 vintage, is built around a single dry-farmed shiraz vineyard planted in 1992 and a young block of own-rooted, bush-vine grenache planted from cuttings Bevan took himself from highly regarded local sites. The wines are made with minimal intervention – sulphur the only addition, unfined and unfiltered – and a vineyard-first philosophy that prizes site and seasonal honesty over stylistic consistency. Small, serious, and deeply rooted in place.

2022 Sven Joschke ‘La Eleanor’ Sangiovese Langhorne Creek
Think Langhorne Creek is all about big juicy malbecs and mint chocolate–tinged cabernets? This supple, elegant sangiovese from Sven Joschke asks you to think again.