Hayes Family Wines

The Free Bacchus Story

On 2 January 2025 the Hayes team was slashing grass between the rows of its old vineyard at Stone Well when a spark started a small spot fire. It ran from Block 6 up to Block 8 and into a neighbour’s grazing land before the Country Fire Service put it out, in under an hour. A small number of vines did not survive, and Brett Hayes dropped that year’s crop from the burnt blocks, even from vines only lightly singed.

Hayes, once a partner in a large international consulting firm, started the business with his family in 2014, with the winemaker Andrew Seppelt, formerly general manager and winemaker at Torbreck. The vineyard took a four-year search with the grower Marcus Schulz, whose commitment to biodynamic and organic farming, Hayes says, steered their own. It is 4.5 hectares on the Barossa’s western ridge, planted in 1948 to Shiraz, Grenache and Mataro on their own roots, and Hayes says the planters knew what they were doing: Shiraz on the more fertile ground, Mataro on the heavy clay, Grenache on the rock.

The ridge is dry, with less than 400 millimetres of rain in most years, so disease pressure is low, but organic farming here still costs something, and Hayes says so. Yields are lower and the hand work higher. The old vines usually give about a tonne of fruit an acre; in the drought of 2020 they gave about 200 kilograms, a crop down 80 per cent, and hail in late 2021 halved the next one. The commitment comes with a published condition: Hayes says it should farm organically for as long as its grapes are as good as, or better than, conventionally farmed ones.

The estate vineyard and the winery were certified organic by Australian Certified Organic in February 2020, and the Schulz family’s Primrose blocks have since been certified too. The certificate covers the Estate wines and the Hillside Shiraz; most of the wider range is made from other growers’ fruit and is not certified. The flagship, the Estate Shiraz Block 9, comes from the 1948 planting’s shallowest, stoniest ground, which crops very low.