The story of Mordrelle begins with a wedding. Moran had always dreamed of making high-end sparkling wine, and when he married Michelle – whose family is from the Adelaide Hills – he found both his collaborators and his canvas. “I always dreamed to make high end sparkling wines, and lucky enough I married someone from the Adelaide Hills,” he says. “I invited her extended family to make a blanc de blancs for our wedding, and that’s how Mordrelle Wines was born.” The first wine, a blanc de blancs made from Adelaide Hills chardonnay, has since become the anchor of the range – a traditional-method sparkling wine, meaning it undergoes its second fermentation in the bottle to develop bubbles in the same manner as champagne, that now spends six to seven years on lees before release.
Moran studied winemaking and viticulture in Argentina, worked vintages in the United States, then moved to Australia where he completed a PhD in viticulture and oenology at the University of Adelaide while simultaneously working full time as a research scientist at SARDI – the South Australian Research and Development Institute – and making wine for Mordrelle on the side. The research scientist and the winemaker are not separate people. Moran approaches the cellar with the same systematic rigour he brings to a laboratory, and his conclusions about lees ageing come from both empirical observation and lived experience. “All our wines have low sulphite additions given the extended time on lees,” he explains. “This adds mannoproteins – compounds produced by yeast cells during ageing that act as natural antioxidants – and we notice our wines can handle oxidation much better than those made commercially with higher sulphites.” The logic is elegant: the longer you age on lees, the less you need to add.
The chardonnay and pinot noir are both sourced from the ex-Lenswood Research Station – a vineyard planted in randomised experimental blocks with three clones across three different rootstocks, originally designed for scientific trials. It is an unusual site, and an unusually instructive one. “I found this wine to be so unique, that I love the flavours we get from the site,” says Moran. “I have never tasted something similar.” The vineyard maintains excellent canopy balance with minimal irrigation and permanent green cover – conditions that produce naturally well-balanced fruit without requiring heavy intervention. The chardonnay averages 15 months on lees before release; the pinot noir between 14 and 24 months, depending on the vintage.
His golden rule, applied across every wine in the range, is a single word: time. “You need to wait to get that balance right,” he says. “You cannot make these wines otherwise if you don’t have the patience. Forget about the cashflow, and focus on the time and understanding of the magnificent changes they manifest through that extended time of ageing, shaping the wines to a point you can smile and share that excitement with wine lovers.” The decision to work this way is a deliberate departure from commercial logic. “You have to let go of textbooks, industry styles, and do what your experience has told you in the last ten to fifteen years of winemaking – believing in what is the best approach, taking out the economics and the politics.”
One practical measure of that commitment is Moran’s mastery of disgorging à la volée – a technique where the lees plug is expelled from a sparkling wine bottle by hand without first freezing the neck, relying entirely on timing, pressure and skill. Standard commercial disgorgement freezes the bottle neck to collect the lees in a solid plug, then pops it cleanly. À la volée requires years of practice to execute without losing wine. “This took me several years of practice to get it right to near perfection,” he says. “These days we disgorge everything à la volée – so we don’t need to freeze the bottle necks anymore, which saves us energy and time. This can be called a really sustainable approach.” It is also a point of pride, and a fitting emblem of a project that has chosen the harder, more demanding path at every turn.
The label’s connection to Argentina runs deeper than biography. The artwork on every Mordrelle bottle is by Moran’s father, José Luis Morán, an Argentine painter whose equestrian and landscape works now feature not just on labels but are available for purchase through the winery’s art gallery. It gives Mordrelle an identity that is genuinely its own – part research scientist’s precision, part family inheritance, part stubborn patience. Italian varieties are the next frontier Moran wants to explore further – barbera is already in the range, fiano on his mind. The Adelaide Hills small-producer community, he says, shares his minimalist sensibility, which makes it the right home. “Minimalistic winemaking seems to be a common ground in the Adelaide Hills – small-batch, soulful wines with great character. Perhaps our main difference is the amount of time those wines age on lees.”
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