Giles Cooke MW and Fergal Tynan MW, with the helping hand of Peter Leske, hand-make small-batch wines that illustrate the benefits of great sites and intelligent winemaking.
Our 2 Masters of Wine, Giles and Fergal met in a bar the night before they began the first year of the Master of Wine course in 1998. Both subsequently passed the exam and eventually came to work together, founding Thistledown in 2010.
Both share a degree in history, a love of Australian wine and the cause of the underdog. Both also shared a frustration that, in many markets, Australian wine was stereotyped as big, alcoholic, and unsuited to premium restaurants. Both knew that this didn’t have to be the case and set upon a journey to create wines of elegance, detail and balance.
IT TAKES A REVOLUTION IN WINEMAKING TO PRODUCE WORLD-CLASS GRENACHE
Reinventing, experimenting and improvising are at the core of Thistledown’s unconventional approach to world-class Grenache.
We harness the energy from South Australia’s iconic vineyard sites in McLaren Vale & the Barossa Valley to produce small batches of hand-crafted, textural Grenache of world-class quality.
We source our fruit from many of the best sites in the iconic regions of South Australia. We work closely with growers who, like us, want to see the character of their vineyard as faithfully portrayed in the bottle as possible. Over a period of time, we have gained access to sites that we only dreamed of in the early days, and feel privileged to be able to craft wines from Australia’s viticultural history.
From our base in the beautiful Adelaide Hills, we are set up perfectly to deal with the multitude of small batches that we receive. We are always experimenting and trialing and work on the basis that if we haven't made one mistake each vintage, we haven't been trying hard enough! Conventional wisdom is to be respected but challenged at every turn, and it's fair to say that when we challenge the traditional, we succeed. Our approach to winemaking is simple. We work with great sites, so our job is to coax that fruit into the bottle, retaining as much energy and personality as possible. Low yielding sites, hand-picked a little earlier, are where it begins. In the winery, the small batches are allowed to ferment spontaneously. We use minimal extraction, love concrete fermenters and enjoy the detail that oak can bring, but not the dominating flavor. Thistledown's unique blend of unrivaled fruit sources and the experience of both the New and the Old Worlds, lent by our 2 Master of Wine, helps craft a wine of subtlety, texture, and detail – wines that surprise and delight at every turn.
Our 2 Masters of Wine, Giles and Fergal met in a bar the night before they began the first year of the Master of Wine course in 1998. Both subsequently passed the exam and eventually came to work together, founding Thistledown in 2010.
Both share a degree in history, a love of Australian wine and the cause of the underdog. Both also shared a frustration that, in many markets, Australian wine was stereotyped as big, alcoholic, and unsuited to premium restaurants. Both knew that this didn’t have to be the case and set upon a journey to create wines of elegance, detail and balance.
IT TAKES A REVOLUTION IN WINEMAKING TO PRODUCE WORLD-CLASS GRENACHE
Reinventing, experimenting and improvising are at the core of Thistledown’s unconventional approach to world-class Grenache.
We harness the energy from South Australia’s iconic vineyard sites in McLaren Vale & the Barossa Valley to produce small batches of hand-crafted, textural Grenache of world-class quality.
We source our fruit from many of the best sites in the iconic regions of South Australia. We work closely with growers who, like us, want to see the character of their vineyard as faithfully portrayed in the bottle as possible. Over a period of time, we have gained access to sites that we only dreamed of in the early days, and feel privileged to be able to craft wines from Australia’s viticultural history.
From our base in the beautiful Adelaide Hills, we are set up perfectly to deal with the multitude of small batches that we receive. We are always experimenting and trialing and work on the basis that if we haven't made one mistake each vintage, we haven't been trying hard enough! Conventional wisdom is to be respected but challenged at every turn, and it's fair to say that when we challenge the traditional, we succeed. Our approach to winemaking is simple. We work with great sites, so our job is to coax that fruit into the bottle, retaining as much energy and personality as possible. Low yielding sites, hand-picked a little earlier, are where it begins. In the winery, the small batches are allowed to ferment spontaneously. We use minimal extraction, love concrete fermenters and enjoy the detail that oak can bring, but not the dominating flavor. Thistledown's unique blend of unrivaled fruit sources and the experience of both the New and the Old Worlds, lent by our 2 Master of Wine, helps craft a wine of subtlety, texture, and detail – wines that surprise and delight at every turn.
