Blood on the Werkstatt floor: The story of a heart-breaking winery accident
Few things in our lives have quite the power to unhinge us quite like a telephone call. The best moments of my life, and the worst, have often occurred down the invisible line. I thought of this yesterday, after I’d received an email from Bridget Mac, the creative force behind the esteemed wine name, Werkstatt. Bridget Mac learned recently, after she’d picked up her phone, that the prized jewel of her 2025 vintage – her 2025 Werkstatt Mount Gambier Pinot Noir – had been destroyed in a winery accident. Bridget Mac only makes one red wine each year, and this was it. The value of the loss was in the vicinity of $150,000, which for a tiny producer is a monstrous sum. Mac described herself, because of this news, as being “gutted”. The wine itself had only been collected, in tank, two days prior to the accident. It was collected in this tank because it was due to be bottled the following week. This tiny window of time was enough for an errant forklift to puncture the tank. The sight of all those litres of beautiful red wine gushing from the tank, and onto the concrete floor, was eventually mirrored by the blood rushing away from Mac’s head when she heard the news.
“The person who reversed into my tank with the forklift, called me (I was at home). I almost fainted, and needed to sit down. It was an intense feeling, learning that your work and art was on the floor, and (in the) drain of the winery.”
There’s a moment, in the play Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, when the character Hedda takes an unpublished manuscript – a manuscript so prized by its authors that it is described as their “child” – and tosses it into the fire of a open fireplace. There was no back-up copy. In all the books, poems, plays and scripts I’ve read in my life, that moment ranks as one of less than a handful that made me gasp out loud. I thought of this Hedda Gabler moment when I heard of Bridget Mac’s story. I’ve not met Bridget Mac. She’s not a mate. I don’t even think that I ever tasted one of her wines. But something beautiful, and irrecoverable, and unique – that Bridget had invested her heart and soul into – has not only been lost, but has been taken from our experience of the world.
There is no back-up copy.
I didn’t shed at first. But then I went to the GoFundMe page that has been set up to help Bridget Mac’s wine business survive, and then I did. The first words that come out of a person when they first open the vein are often the most telling. When Bridget Mac began to write for the GoFundMe site she started by saying, simply, this: “I am crippled with grief”.
This event, to get into the pragmatics, has put one of the brightest wine businesses in all of our brown land in jeopardy. Mac, who was a visual artist in Berlin for a period and who, originally, was inspired by the beauty that is great German riesling – before working, in Australia, for Lethbridge, and Jim Chatto, and Mel Chester no less – is considered one of Australian wine’s fastest risers. Very few people can make wine of such beauty that it stops people in their tracks; Bridget Mac’s Wersktatt riesling regularly has that ability. Indeed Mike Bennie, who never hands out high scores easily, has reviewed ten of Bridget Mac’s Werkstatt wines on The Winefront site over the past few years, and every single one of them has scored stellar.
“I make small batches with intense care,” Bridget Mac writes. At this point it’s worth noting that the word Werstatt translates to workshop, which to me says something of the bare exposed bones of this winemaking project. “This wine was by far the most substantial amount I have made to date, and easily the most costly to produce. I was hoping to finally break even, pay myself a wage, and share this special vintage beyond the core fans and restaurants who already love it,” Bridget Mac writes.
The GoFundMe page to help the Werkstatt winery survive is here.
The Australian wine community likes to think of itself as a generous collective soul. If ever there was a time to prove it, now is it.
