OUR
STORY
I'm a 6th generation Barossan living here with my beautiful partner Megan, son Arthur and winery dog Frankie.
In the 1840's my forefathers planted vineyards and started making wine adjacent Jacob's Creek in the sub region of Krondorf, Barossa Valley. Our family has owned and farmed vineyards here in every generation since.
The vineyards we now farm are not our original family vineyards but ones we acquired in 2013. With these vines I look forward to adding another chapter to our Barossa grape and wine story.
Brett Grocke
Owner/Winemaker/Farmer
Viticulture/Farming:
Our wine style is firmly entrenched in the vineyard and is the basis of our motto 'wines built from the dirt up'. With many years of experience in vineyard management and consulting we've fine tuned our farming practices allowing us to produce fruit of the highest quality. We follow organic and regenerative principles to create healthy living soils that have a synergistic relationship with our grapevines allowing them to produce resilient flavoursome fruit. Our intervention in the vineyard comes with balanced hand pruning, shoot thinning, bunch thinning and mechanical and hand weed control. Our grapes are all hand picked and hand sorted with many blocks undergoing multiple picks to achieve the optimum level of maturity.
Eperosa's off-grid, underground winery and cellar door
Winemaking:
Our winemaking is along traditional methods where we endeavour to capture the true characters of the vineyard. Our aim is to harvest fruit that is balanced, vibrant and flavour packed requiring little or no additions. The fruit is hand sorted into small open fermenters and the whole clusters gently foot stomped. The ferments are hand plunged and/or rack and returned daily and typically stay on skins for 18-24 days before being basket pressed into French oak barrels. The wines are aged for 8-20 months (depending on the cuvee) on lees where malolactic fermentation runs its natural course. The wines are gravity settled and carefully hand racked prior to bottling.
Eco-friendly:
Our underground winery was build foremost for its function, simple yet beautiful in its design harnessing the thermal properties of earth and concrete. The end result is a structure with a large thermal mass stabilising temperature and humidity, ideal for wine maturation and part of our eco-friendly philosophy. The cellar and vineyard irrigation system is run by an off grid 30kW solar system including 3 tonnes of 2 Volt gel cell batteries. This combined with modern LED lighting technology, the latest in low emission gas forklifts, manual labour and gravity make for a very low impact winery. Two underground concrete rainwater tanks store 45,000 litres of the most pure tasting rainwater.