About Brokenwood Wines

Brokenwood Wines started out as a hobby venture for solicitors Tony Albert, John Beeston and James Halliday in 1970 and became one of Australia’s best known wine producers, despite themselves. At the time they paid a record price of $970 an acre for the 10-acre block in the lower reaches of the Brokenback Ranges. The block was actually supposed to be a cricket ground, but they planted Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz and bowled everyone over.

The first vintage, picked in 1973, was carted to the winery in Len Evans' Bentley in buckets. The partners and their families – and anyone else they could rope in - were elbows deep in grapes as they produced their first vintage, seventy-five dozen Shiraz/Cabernet, which was a hit to the boundary right from the start.

A new winery was built in 1975, as demand outstripped their capacity to contain the growing score of runs on the board. New fermentation tanks and oak barrels were installed, a dormitory kind of accommodation was built and the gang of weekend warriors worked and played hard as they made the wine and tasted the very special boutique nectar around the table on the first floor balcony. It is a well-known fact that ‘many of Australia’s most prominent wine identities “did their time” in the vineyards at Brokenwood during the Seventies.’

Six new partners joined the three partners in 1978 and together they bought next door ‘Graveyard Vineyard,’ once intended to be used as a cemetery, but planted with Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon vines instead of dead bodies. It seems that wherever they bought, they changed the rules! It was just not cricket!

Brokenwood Wines Vineyard is blessed with heavy clay soil, which gives off low yields, but tremendous concentration of flavour in the berries. This is the secret of why their wines, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir, Riesling, Sangiovese, Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon, Shiraz and Viognier are so distinctive.