Lowe Family Wine Co

The Free Bacchus Story

David Lowe helped his father plant the first vines on the family farm, Tinja, in 1973. He went on to run the winemaking at Rothbury Estate in the Hunter Valley, where the chairman, Len Evans, had him taste what Evans considered the twenty best wines in the world. Nine of them, Lowe noticed, came from biodynamic or organic vineyards.

He made his first vintage at home in 2000, on a vineyard and farm he describes as broken and overrun with weeds. He expected to put it right in five to ten years. Twenty-two years in, he wrote in 2023, he had reached 60 per cent of his goal. In 2020, a year of drought and bushfire smoke, he made no wine at all, and the staff stayed on full pay.

Mudgee is continental country at about 500 metres, and Lowe says the altitude keeps the acid in his reds; the critic Huon Hooke counts full-bodied red as the region’s strongest suit. Lowe’s icon wine is Zinfandel, the grape California made famous, grown on bush vines in stone, shale and quartz and planted in the late 1990s. The vines were planted without irrigation. Since the last drought left low yields and poor fruit, they have had winter watering.

Tinja was converted to organic farming in the 2000s and has been run on biodynamic principles since 2011. Its certificate, from Southern Cross Certified, lists the farm and recent wines, the 2023 Zinfandel among them, as organic, and the grapes as biodynamic too. Not every bottle is Tinja fruit. The current Chardonnay comes from other Mudgee vineyards, and the winery says so.