Voyager Estate

The Free Bacchus Story

As a girl, Alexandra Burt was sent trespassing with a jar to take soil samples for her father. Michael Wright, a Western Australian iron-ore heir who, unusually for a vineyard owner, did not drink, bought the vineyard on Stevens Road in southern Margaret River in 1991. It had been planted in 1978 by an agricultural scientist, Peter Gherardi, who called it Freycinet Estate.

Burt took over running the estate in 2005 and became its sole owner in 2018. An organic trial began on the Old Block Cabernet in 2004. The formal conversion started in 2017, and by January 2020 a third of the vineyard and the winery were certified; every vineyard was certified in 2023. The estate is frank about the cost. It wrote that it had replaced herbicides, pesticides and fungicides with “blood, sweat and tears”, and that some of the tried and tested safety nets were gone.

Muscovy ducks deal with the snails, sheep graze the rows in winter after a spell in quarantine, and an old people carrier has been turned into a mobile chicken coop to take hens to the weevil hotspots. The Old Block, planted in 1978 and slowly declining, is being carried forward through three chosen vines, named Maverick, Goose and Slider, propagated on the estate so the new plantings stay certified organic.

Margaret River has ocean on three sides, which keeps its summers mild, and its reference points are Bordeaux grapes. Tim Shand, chief winemaker since 2022 and now estate director, has pulled out blocks he judged ordinary; The Buyer reported 62 hectares of vines on the 400-hectare property in 2025. The flagship, MJW Cabernet Sauvignon from the Old Block and a block planted in 1995, carries Michael Wright’s initials. Southern Cross Certified now holds the certificate, which ACO held before it; the sparkling wines and the older cellar releases are labelled organically farmed, not certified.