Smallfry Wines

The Free Bacchus Story

In December 2010 four inches of rain fell on the Smallfry vineyard in one night. Wayne Ahrens was part of the way through converting to biodynamics, and he wrote afterwards that no fungicide, chemical or biodynamic, could have held against a rain event like that; they had to fall back on copper hydroxide and wettable sulphur. Then botrytis rot got into the Shiraz. Within days, he wrote, he had a call from the bank manager.

Ahrens and Suzi Hilder describe themselves as viticulturists bitten by the winemaking bug. He is from a fifth-generation Barossa family and spent seven vintages as a cellar hand at Orlando Wyndham; she was a consultant viticulturist. Their Vine Vale vineyard came with vines well over a hundred years old and a handshake promise not to change it. The family before them had farmed it for generations, and the last of them had put in 52 vintages.

Vine Vale is not an official sub-region, but growers there describe sandy soils at the foot of the Barossa Range, with cool air falling from Eden Valley above. The Barossa made its name on rich Shiraz; this end of it gives lighter, fresher wines, and that is the side Smallfry is on. The certifying cost them too. They stopped buying other growers’ fruit, which ended one of their wines, and had to buy their own sprayer, because contractors could no longer be used unless they were certified as well.

Vine Vale was certified biodynamic by the end of 2013, and the wines were certified from the 2014 vintage. The certificate is now Southern Cross Certified’s. It covers the vineyard as organic and biodynamic but names only a handful of wines, among them the Rieslings, the Pond Rosé and the Vine Vale Shiraz. Tangerine Dream, the skin-contact white Ahrens calls their most popular wine, is not on it. Its story is still the best one here. The old Semillon and Pedro Ximénez vines it comes from were once thought a waste of space, and Smallfry kept them in the ground by selling their fruit as verjuice at the farmers’ market.