Henschke

The Free Bacchus Story

The Shiraz vines at Hill of Grace were planted in the Eden Valley in the 1860s. They are among the oldest producing vines anywhere in the world, and they have never had synthetic chemistry applied to them.

Henschke is a sixth-generation family estate, and the farming record precedes the organic movement entirely — it was simply how the vineyard had always been worked. What the estate has not done is certify it. Southern Cross Certified lists Henschke Cellars at certificate 26063 with every line In-Conversion, which is the stage before certification rather than certification itself, and they are not certified by Australian Certified Organic either: its registers return nothing under Henschke, Keyneton, Mount Edelstone, Hill of Grace, Abbotts Prayer or Lenswood. The biodynamic work on the old sites is practice: the Demeter register for Australia lists 126 operators and none of them is this one. Prue and Stephen Henschke's understanding of the ground, built over a career of incremental adjustment rather than any single decision, is what the wines actually express.

Prue Henschke assembled the farming from wherever it had already worked: permanent swards and steep-hillside viticulture from Germany, mulching from South Africa.

The Hill of Grace Shiraz has drawn 99 points from Wine Advocate and sits among the half-dozen most celebrated wines in Australian history. Schist and ancient sedimentary soils, Eden Valley altitude and vine age produce a depth that younger-vine Barossa or McLaren Vale Shiraz cannot replicate, and the wines age for thirty years or more. Mount Edelstone, from an adjacent site planted in 1912, carries equivalent ambition at a somewhat more reachable price.

The same standard applies across Riesling, Grenache and the other Eden Valley varieties. It would have been easy to reserve the careful farming for the famous vineyard; they did not, which tells you it was never a marketing decision.