James Turpie
While Australia has a long and storied history of wine growing, it’s fair to say that New Zealand doesn’t. With a few notable exceptions – such as James Busby’s vineyards in Waitangi, or the vineyards planted in Hawkes Bay in the mid 19th century by Marist missionaries for communion wine – the New Zealand wine story starts in the 1970s, and only really gets going in the 1980s, after the country got over its ill-advised love affair with the müller-thurgau variety. You’d therefore have to have some stones to start an Australian wine label that is explicitly modelled after the wines of Central Otago in New Zealand – especially if you were to start the label in Australia’s oldest wine region, the Hunter Valley. And yet this is exactly what James Turpie has done with his label, James Edward Wines – which offers a tight range of chardonnay, pinot noir, chenin blanc, gewürztraminer, and shiraz – and its wild-child sibling label, Maison de Turps, where Turpie’s more unconventional experiments in winemaking can blossom.
