If you haven’t heard of the Our Fathers label from South Australia it is hardly surprising: this is Boutique winemaking with a capital ‘B’, producing just one wine per year, and a strictly limited number of bottles to boot. But terrific though the wine is (see my review of the two most recent vintages below), the story behind Our Fathers is really what this wine is all about.
Edinburgh-based Giles Cook MW is Wine Development Director of Alliance Wines, one of the country’s most important wine importers and distributors, a position he has held for almost 25 years. But that is his day job. By night (well, crammed into his annual leave and professional travels I suspect), he is a winemaker and co-owner of Thistledown Wines in Australia, having founded the company along with fellow MW, Fergal Tynan. But Giles now has his own side-project, a label called Our Fathers that is very personal to Giles, and which was born out of life-changing events.
The goal of Our Fathers is not just to make excellent, ‘hands-off’ wines from ancient Shiraz vineyards in the Barossa, but to support charities that became particularly close to Giles’ heart. Late in 2013 his father was diagnosed with lung cancer, and just 50 days later he passed away. Inspired by the care his father had received, Giles wanted to give something back, and the first inklings of an idea for a special wine where all profits would be donated to linked causes was born. Later the same year, while walking through a 125-year-old Barossa Valley vineyard, Giles’ idea took more solid form: he would make a wine from this very vineyard, tended for over a century by ‘our fathers’.
The project began, but before their first wine was even released, a second tragedy struck when Giles’ mother, who had battled mental illness for many years, took her own life in 2014. The Our Fathers project began to take on even greater significance, but life was not quite finished dishing out challenges to Giles just yet. In 2015, completely out of the blue, he suffered a heart attack. As he recovered it seemed more important than ever that Our Fathers should succeed, and I imagine gave him a focus and a goal to help deal with two years of turmoil.
When that first 2014 vintage was eventually released, it garnered unanimous critical acclaim, and charities including Scottish Action on Mental Health, St Columba’s Hospice in Edinburgh, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation all benefitted from the profits.
Each bottle is handsomely sealed with wax (thankfully a nice wax composition that slices off rather than shattering into a million pieces), and these really are cracking examples of old-vine Barossa Shiraz at its best. The wines are on strict allocation priced at £150 for six bottles, and available by joining the mailing list at ourfatherswines.co.uk.
Quite fancy some of these