Gemtree Wines, McLaren Vale, Australia.
I’m not going to lie, Mike Brown scared the life out of me when I first met him on a buying trip to South Australia. Towering at something approaching 6 ft 4 and seemingly chiselled from granite, he had an expression to match when he spoke with passion at a winemakers dinner about the sort of wines he thought McLaren Vale should be building a reputation on. When we met him the next day among his vines and in the company of Melissa - his wife and business parter - we got what he was about.
Mike and Melissa are about treating their environment with respect - their vineyards resemble more of a nature reserve and they’ve given over chunks of land to wildlife conservation. They’re also about making biodynamic wines of stunning purity - wines that somehow feel alive in the glass.
At the end of our three week trip, after dozens of vineyards visited and hundreds of wines tasted, we reflected on what were our favourite wines of the trip. What would be take home if we had to choose just one wine. Ten other merchants gave their verdicts. I said ‘I’ll take Sub Terra from Gemtree’. Ten other merchants hastily revised their choices and agreed - that wine was other-wordly.
I honestly couldn’t be more excited to add Gemtree to our range - the very embodiment of our ‘Good wines, made sustainably by good people’ ethos.
“How could you not love a guy who buries a barrel of his best Shiraz just to see what happens and ends up producing a wine that I’m still thinking about a year later?”
The BinTwo take