Peter Dredge is not a winemaker by accident
Winemaker Peter Dredge, aka Dr. Edge.
When Peter Dredge was seventeen years old he was resting by the side of an athletic track in Adelaide when he was hit in the head with a discus. He spent five months in hospital as a result. By the end of those five months he’d lost the hearing in his right ear, his sense of balance, and his dreams. Until that point he’d been hellbent on a career as an AFL footballer, and on studies in sports science. Both these dreams were now lost. Nearly thirty years later his school friends still describe Dredge as having been an “unbelievable athlete”. He’s over 190 centimetres tall but had played as a damaging midfielder; he was, at the time of the accident, the prototype of the future. When he was able Peter Dredge returned to school and studied his year twelve over the course of two years. These years were the dark years during which his sense of hope cast no discernible light. “I listened to a lot of morose, trip-hop music during that time,” he now says. The epicentre of this music were the bands Portishead and more especially the band Massive Attack. The epicentre of Massive Attack was the artist and band member Robert Del Naja. Del Naja paints extraordinarily emotional works in which colour feels both discordant and harmonious at once, as if the colours themselves would laugh if they weren’t crying. Del Naja himself is colourblind. Dredge’s school friends finished high school a year or two earlier than him and so by the time he was ready to step into the adult world he felt not just dreamless but empty. This is where the story of Peter Dredge stops being an unfortunate story and becomes an Australian Story. His mother had a connection to Brian Croser and in passing Croser had enquired about her son Peter’s health. In the dark recesses of Peter Dredge’s hope there was a desire to study science of the sports variety. Croser arranged for Petaluma to give him a summer job in its lab. Peter Dredge did not become a winemaker by accident. He became a winemaker by having an accident. He “inflicted” Massive Attack on the cellars of Petaluma all that first summer. Dredge himself of course could only hear the music out of one ear. Dredge is not deaf and his hero Del Naja is not blind but the existence of an impairment is a void into which the world rushes at ferocious speed. From his first days as a winemaker Dredge has been “manic in my desire to work as many harvests around the world as I can. I’ve tried to fit as many wines and as many vintages into my life as possible”. Dredge calls himself a “first generation winemaker” and when he says this he means that every inch of his wine knowledge has had to be learned, gained, fought and clawed. Nothing in wine has come to him for free. When you go to the new Tolpuddle cellar door they tell you their origin story and in it they credit Peter Dredge – who has nothing to do with Tolpuddle – as the one who steered them towards that vineyard’s magnificence. The manic aspect of Peter Dredge’s time in wine has developed a kind of spiralling aura that is part real and is part mythical. When Dredge set out to create his own wine label, ten years ago, he travelled to Bristol in the UK and bought an artwork by Del Naja and then negotiated for the right to display it on his wine labels. This artwork is from a collection known as Del Naja’s “Headz Series”. Peter Dredge, cut from the rock of a head trauma, has included an image from this Headz Series on most of the wines that he’s released under his own name since. The name he uses as his brand is the nickname he acquired at his first job post his acquired head injury. The name is Dr. Edge. It’s both a play on his name and a stab at a truth. Wine is the doctor who helped save Dredge. The edge is where Peter has lived ever since. Dr. Edge is a name that you might even laugh at, if you weren’t crying.
The wines Dr. Edge makes are, like Del Naja’s colours, both discordant and harmonious. Last weekend I tasted a good many of them, forty-six wines in total, ten years of work in the life of a man and his lands. I picked up a Riesling and wrote: Is this even Riesling? I picked up a Brut Nature sparkling wine and wrote: I am speechless. I tasted a pinot noir that had been fermented and matured in concrete only and felt as I drank it that I was holding my ear to a shell and could taste the sound of pinot waves crashing. On all three occasions it was the purity that did me in. The purity in Dr. Edge’s wines, when they are at their best, is like a scream in a dark night. There is though something other in his wines; a hand. This hand promotes the impression in the best of Dr. Edge’s wines that something that has never before been spoken is in the process of being said. It’s as if in his winemaking Dredge can hear or sense things that we can’t. His wines then plunge you into the purest of cold streams before reaching in via textures and flavours to help you out. Dr. Edge’s wines would enquire, if they could, to your son’s health. They are lithe, racy wines that feel as though they have a fitness. If Dr. Edge’s wines were footballers they would hold their shape as they ran amok on a wing. They are wines, like Peter Dredge himself, that act is if there is no time to lose. They are wines, like Peter Dredge himself, that act as if life is so fragile that you must grip it with your heart and with your sorrow and with all the broken legs and ears and arms that you have either at your disposal, or have hidden in your closet.
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Dr. Edge’s best wines are his chardonnays, and his sparkling wines, and his pinot noirs, and his rieslings. The pinot noir that was fermented in concrete only was (subscriber only) reviewed on The Winefront site in the reviews here. The Brut Nature NV was reviewed on The Winefront here, though it’s arguably a better and more compelling wine than this description implies (which Gary Walsh himself would agree with). The Riesling that rocked my world was the Dr. Edge South Riesling 2020 and then too, also, the Dr. Edge Riesling 2022. The Dr. Edge Tasmania Pinot Noir 2024 – which is the current release – may have a touch more oak than some would like but is, to me, a magnificent Pinot Noir. Gary Walsh reviewed it on The Winefront site here; I would have been (easily) a point higher.
There are 51 reviews of Dr. Edge’s wines in The Winefront archive.
