Wendouree
Wendouree is a Mattinson Ten Star Winery.
Only the best of Australia’s best are ranked as a Mattinson Ten Star Winery.
There was a time in the early 1970s when the Wendouree vineyard was not only overgrown but essentially lay abandoned. The property had been sold but had not yet been re-sold, and in the whistle of these intervening years some of the trellising broke, the vines left to wander wild. Since this moment we have come a long way. The Wendouree winery now and for the past 50 years (Tony and Lita Brady bought Wendouree in 1974) has effectively been everything that every other winery is not. It’s humble, it’s human and it's quiet, the wines and their general mystique allowed to speak for themselves.
Wendouree has no cellar door, does not receive appointments, and has almost no retail or media presence. We know more about the day-to-day running of the KGB than we do of Wendouree.
Love, we do know, has been known to be blind, but the love of Clare Valley producer Wendouree as a place, as a people, and as a producer of Australian wine is clear-sighted and true. You can love Wendouree, but you can’t replicate it, or replace it. Wendouree makes wines of historical stature, quality and importance more or less every year, its idiosyncracy both unchallenged and adored. Its red wines, famously, present as firm sheets of velvet.
A subscriber to The Winefront site spoke for many when he wrote, “If I were suddenly to find myself on Centrelink (unemployment) benefits, Wendouree would be the only annual subscription I would die in a ditch to maintain.”
The reply to this comment, by another subscriber to The Winefront, was “when I lost my job at Ansett I still bought Wendouree.”
Wendouree walks where no one else does. Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, and blends of these varieties. Old vines, swinging in the breeze. All the wines, effectively, are sold direct from the winery, via a mailing list that is near-impossible to get on (or at least, you have to write and then physically mail in your expression of interest, and then wait/hope for five years). If you are lucky enough to be on this mailing list, you sent an order form each year, and each of these order forms is marked with a different colour of Crayon, the colour related to how long you’ve been on the Wendouree list or, in other words, according to the length of your loyalty.
Crayon. In 2025. There’s only one Wendouree. As James Halliday once wrote, “this is in every sense a treasure beyond price”.
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Vertical tastings of Wendouree’s wines are rarer than rare. In 2022 Mike Bennie and Gary Walsh attended one of these rare events and wrote notes under the title Wendouree Shiraz Retrospective: Wendouree Shiraz 1983-2000. This is both an invaluable and essential resource for lovers of Wendouree Shiraz.
Every year, or as often as possible, the wines of Wendouree are reviewed on The Winefront by Gary Walsh – see here.
In 2024, for the first time, the new Wendouree Shiraz 24b 2022 was reviewed on the Winefront – see here.
The Wendouree Timeline:
Wendouree (A.P. Birks' Wendouree Cellars) was founded by the Birks brothers in 1892.
The first Wendouree wines were released in 1895.
Wendouree’s cellars were built in 1914.
1974. Lita and Tony Brady took ownership of Wendouree cellars.
Gary Walsh will again review the latest Wendouree wines, when they arrive, sometime around the middle of 2025.
Personally, I nab bottles of Wendouree Cabernet Malbec whenever I can.
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Campbell Mattinson is the former Chief Editor of Halliday, and is the founder of The Winefront. He’s authored six books, has won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year award twice, and has been a journalist since 1987. He is also a commercial photographer.
