Cullen Wines

The Free Bacchus Story

Kevin Cullen was a doctor before he planted vines. In his own surgery he saw the effects of agricultural chemicals on potato farmers first hand. He later died of motor neurone disease, which his daughter believes may have been linked to Agent Orange exposure while serving as a doctor in Vietnam.

The farming here has a personal origin, not a commercial one. His daughter Vanya Cullen has run the estate since the 1990s, following her parents' deaths, and two of the wines are named for them — the Kevin John Chardonnay for her father, the Diana Madeline Cabernet-Merlot for her mother, the couple who planted the vineyard and helped establish Margaret River as a wine region at all.

She then did something almost nobody attempts: a full biodynamic conversion under Demeter certification while simultaneously pursuing carbon neutrality, and reached both. Very few wineries anywhere hold that pair of credentials in parallel. The synthetic chemistry came out progressively from the 1990s and has stayed out, under certified organic and biodynamic standards, ever since.

None of this was done from the margins. Cullen is one of Margaret River's founding estates and one of Australia's most awarded producers, a house with everything to lose from an experiment that failed. The Diana Madeline is the wine that made the case for Margaret River as a serious Cabernet region, and it ages with a composure that only sustained farming produces.

If this estate stood in Burgundy or the Médoc it would have a waiting list and a reputation to match. In Margaret River it goes on being quietly, stubbornly excellent, which is a good argument for looking further down the map than habit suggests.