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The UK's No.1 Australian Wine Specialist
Ever since historic Scots, James Busby and John MacArthur founded the Australian wine industry in the early 19th century, the relationship between Scotland and Australia has been an enduring one. Guardians of a long history, Thistledown Wine Co. continues the tradition of Scottish ingenuity and great Australian wine. From their small-batch winery in the idyllic Adelaide Hills, they work with pristine fruit sourced from iconic vineyard sites.
Giles Cooke MW and Fergal Tynan MW, with the helping hand of Peter Leske, hand-make small-batch wines that illustrate the benefits of great sites and intelligent winemaking. Giles and Fergal met in a bar the night before they began the first year of the Master of Wine course in 1998. Both subsequently passed the exam and eventually came to work together, founding Thistledown in 2010.
Both share a degree in history, a love of Australian wine and the cause of the underdog. Both also shared a frustration that, in many markets, Australian wine was stereotyped as big, alcoholic, and unsuited to premium restaurants. Both knew that this didn’t have to be the case and set upon a journey to create wines of elegance, detail and balance.
The Thistledown approach to winemaking is simple. They work with remarkable sites, so their job is to coax that fruit in to bottle, retaining as much of that energy and personality as possible. Low yielding sites, hand-picked a little earlier. In the winery, the small batches are allowed to ferment spontaneously, they use minimal extraction, love concrete fermenters and enjoy the detail that oak can bring, but not the dominating flavour.
They started with a vision to produce wines that are definitively "of their place" and though that sounds a bit pretentious it’s just about making wines that reflect the personality of the place, the growers and of course the Thistledown team.
Giles and Fergal love wines with life, vibrancy of fruit, texture, tension and drinking appeal. In order to achieve this, they only buy very high quality grapes from growers who share the vision and are prepared to work with them to deliver pristine fruit to the winery.
It's become the norm in some regions to give the grapes extended hang time and to look for fruit sweetness and ripe flavours in the vineyard. They prefer to work with fruit that still has great balance of sweetness, acidity and tannin - fruit that is picked "on the way up rather than on the way down."
Working with a unique blend of unrivalled fruit sources and the experience of both the New and the Old Worlds, lent by their two Masters of Wine. They craft wine of subtlety, texture and detail – wines a long way down the path to perfect balance. Experimenting and trialling from their base in the beautiful Adelaide Hills, working on the basis that if they haven’t made one mistake each vintage, they haven’t been trying hard enough!
All orders will be shipped on Monday 24th October for delivery on Tuesday 25th October, unless advised otherwise.
“Hooley dooley. This 2021 Sands of Time Old Vine Single Vineyard Grenache shows Grenache in its best light.
What a wine.” Erin Larkin, RobertParker.com
2021 Thistledown Sands of Time Old Vine Grenache
97+ points - Erin Larkin, RobertParker.com “Hooley dooley. Good. This 2021 Sands of Time Old Vine Single Vineyard Grenache shows Grenache in its best light; when the fruit is buoyant, succulent, airy and spicy, but also when it has been compressed and screwed down into place by gossamer fine tannins. This is tight yet expansive, classy yet exciting: a wine of amalgums and complexity. So what does it taste like? First, raspberry leaf tea, red licorice, berry coulis... then blood, ferrous and iodine seep into the edges and drag with them licorice, pink peppercorn, hung deli meat and a whiff of blackberry pie. It finishes slender, with graphite and quartz. The cooler year has exposed a fine framework of ripe, whippy tannins, which hold the fruit in place—ever-present yet invisible. What a wine.”
2019 Thistledown Advance Release Grenache
‘Best of the Best’ and 97 Points - James Halliday “An amalgam of quartz, sandy loams and ironstone soils; young dry-grown vines, propitiously sited at 550m and articulated across a wild yeast fermentation, incorporating 22% whole-bunch. And versed winemaking nouse. Only 720 bottles made, this is exceptional. Up there with the very finest that this country crafts. Kirsch, sandalwood, pomegranate, wood smoke, clove and the rasp of real tannic mettle. This flows long, with an attractive brittle weave for savouriness and the next glass. The alcohol sits right for this late ripener.
2020 Thistledown Where Eagles Dare
Single Vineyard Shiraz
97 points - Erin Larkin, RobertParker.com “The fruit for the 2020 Where Eagles Dare Shiraz is from the Matchoss Vineyard in the Eden Valley. One assumes the title refers to the great elevation at which this vineyard is situated; 550 meters above sea level is a commanding perch. The dirt up there is pink quartz pressed into ironstone, and it's compacted into all the dirt roads you care to drive down. It's a beautiful thing, actually. Aromatically, the wine offers up sumac, biltong and mulberries with a graphite, crushed lead-pencil character. The wine is minerally and layered with black tea, spring flowers, red apple skins and a raft of forest berries. Really smart, and a decant is going to open this up untold.”
2021 Thistledown The Quickening Shiraz
95 points – Erin Larkin, RobertParker.com “Now this is a treat. The cool 2021 season has really gifted the 2021 The Quickening Shiraz with detail, openness and poise, and the tannins emerge as being one of the true highlights. They are ultra fine and grippy, a little bit chewy, and serve to frame the fruit in such a way that they extend the line and length of the experience. I'm smiling as I type this, and I think that's a great sign that I like the wine very much. Delicious.”
2021 Thistledown The Vagabond Grenache
95+ Points – Erin Larkin, RobertParker.com “The 2021 The Vagabond Old Vine Grenache is exotic, fine and layered with silty, black tea tannins. It is the mid-palate onward where the succulence of fruit is revealed, and this comes across as fine but flows up with lithe, ripe fruit and complex spice notes. Eminently balanced and poised, this fills the mouth and the mind simultaneously. Yes.”
95 points – Gary Walsh, The Wine Front “From four old vine vineyards, all in Blewitt Springs. 35% whole bunch. Some concrete egg, some puncheon. Nice. So much perfume here. Dried flowers, thyme, spice, orange peel, raspberry and strawberries. It’s medium-bodied, quite tense and firm, fine sandy grip to tannin, brightness and so much energy, a subtle meaty edge, dry with plenty of grip and superb shape to the long finish, and fresh red fruits and fragrance to close. An outstanding expression of Grenache.
The team behind Thistledown also created Our Fathers. This is a not-for-profit producer of small batch wines from South Australia. They craft delicious, low intervention wines and give all the profits to amazing causes.
A personal journey
Giles Cooke MW has been responsible for some of the most lauded wines coming out of Australia in recent times. As such, Our Fathers was never going to be just a charity gimmick. Giles, who makes wine in both Australia and Spain, has been on a journey in more ways than one. As well as his international travels, he's had a personal journey that inspired him to give something back.
Giles explains the inspiration behind Our Fathers Wine - “In the Winter of 2013, my father was taken ill. A non-smoker all his life, he was diagnosed with lung cancer which had mestastised to the brain. Sadly, he died just 50 days later at the age of 74. Inspired by the care that he had been shown during his illness, I decided that I'd like to give a little back.
Some people, when faced with such tragedy, run a marathon but, doing the thing that I know best, I decided that my contribution would be to make a wine and that any profits would be donated to good causes.
Later the same year, while walking through a 125 year old Barossa Valley vineyard I was struck by the history that a vineyard of this age holds. The gnarled vines, many barely alive, are testament to both the resilience of nature and the spirit of those farming them through good times and bad.
It was an easy decision to make Our Fathers first wine from this very vineyard.
As if all that wasn't enough, the mental illness that my mother had battled with for some years, finally overcame her in the most tragic of ways in July 2014. Another reason to give something back.
Finally, I hope, I had a heart attack in May 2015, totally out of the blue. While very serious, my recovery has been good and my desire to help those less fortunate has only been emboldened. Our Fathers has been a focus for good throughout all of these hurdles…"
It is Our Fathers commitment that all profits from the sale of the wine will be donated to charitable causes. The nature of these causes is:
- St Columbas Hospice, Edinburgh
- Cancer Research UK
- British Heart Foundation
- SAMH - Scottish Association on Mental Health
2016 Our Fathers Original Shiraz
95 Points - Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front “Dark in colour. Broody and rich to taste. Sweet plum, blackberry, coal and cedarwood. A rake of assertive, dry, fruit-soaked tannin. Barossa shiraz as a mothership of flavour. Structure to match. Made in a sweet, power-packed style but a fantastic wine at that.”
"...a wine of ‘gold medal’ standard..."
2018 Our Fathers Original Shiraz
Gary Walsh, The Wine Front “I believe proceeds from this wine go to charities working around mental health, which is a wonderful thing. Giles Cooke MW, is a top bloke, I’ve met him a couple of times, had lunch with him, and can vouch for his excellence as a human. Anyway, we sometimes wear our heart on our sleeves here at TWF, or at least, I certainly do. As part of my personality, or deliberately so, I tend not to filter much of what I say. I’m happy being that way, quite frankly. It may be disarming, but you get it straight, regardless. My Dad died when I was 17, and I think about him quite a lot, especially now that I’m a father myself. He never got to meet my two boys, which is a constant source of sadness to me. Regardless, I’m lucky to have had him for that short time. He was a good man. A good Dad. I miss him. Is that a lump in my throat? Deep breath. Onwards.
Big deep and rich wine here. It’s a warm hug of black fruit, dried herbs and tar, a little mint and dark chocolate. Plush, thick silty tannin, some lavender perfume, mouth-filling flavour, balanced acidity, brightens to some raspberry on the long finish. It’s an excellent, smooth and controlled, yet throaty example of Barossa Shiraz. I’m disinclined to reduce it to a number, but will offer that it’s a wine of ‘gold medal’ standard.”
2019 Our Fathers Spring Follows Winter
Shiraz Grenache
Winemaker: Spring follows Winter uses the same amazing fruit that we use for the Original Shiraz and combines it with delicious, vibrant Grenache to give a rich, pleasing red with enough energy and freshness to be a versatile, more frequent red.
Last week we were thrilled to share James Suckling (and his team’s) scores and notes on Dan's Standish 2020 collection
LAST CHANCE TO BUY WITH 10% DISCOUNT
Offer ends at midnight Friday 21st October
“It was terrific to visit and taste with Dan Standish yesterday to understand his ever-great viticultural and enological talents. He's on a mission to make some of the most exciting reds in Australia. He and his wife Nicole make superb small production shiraz all by themselves” said James…
No wine received 100-points however, two of Dan’s wines topped the long list, as they should… As anticipated, interest from the wine trade is high, particularly for the two 99-pointers. We will release all remaining (under bond) stocks once you have taken whatever you would like.
99 Points - The Relic
99 Points - The Schubert Theorem
98 Points - Lamella
98 Points - The Standish
10% discount on the 2020 Standish Collection
We thought you would appreciate a little concession on the price too
(10% off).
Please enter promo code STANDISH2020 when you checkout. This code only applies to the 2020 wines (both duty paid and under bond). The code expires Friday 21st October.
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