Jericho

The Land

The Jericho Family acknowledge the Peramangk people as the traditional owners of the Mount Lofty Ranges, and the Kaurna people as the traditional owners of the McLaren Vale. We pay our respects to the elders, and people of this country, past, present, and emerging.

The most important thing Neil and Andrew have learned over their many years in winemaking, is that to make the best wines possible, you need to grow the right fruit on the right site. It’s for this reason that we have gone to great lengths to source the best fruit we can. We maintain a close relationship with our growers in the Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale regions, as well as carefully tending to our own vineyard in the McLaren Vale subregion of Blewitt Springs.

Our growers are special people. Their meticulous farming practices and focus on the land means that we can apply a hands off approach to our winemaking, and let the fruit speak for itself.

Our Home

Our Jericho Family home vineyard is located in the McLaren Vale sub-region of Blewitt Springs. Planted on Maslin Sands formed during the Eocene period, we are the current custodians of these 70 year old Grenache, and 50 year old Shiraz plantings. Known for its fragile soils, this little corner of the McLaren Vale produces fruit bursting with concentrated flavour and fine grained tannin.

McLaren Vale

Home to some of the oldest vineyards in Australia, the viticulturists of McLaren Vale have had ample time to perfect what they do. Located south of Adelaide along the picturesque Fleurieu Peninsula, the McLaren Vale boasts some of the most interesting and diverse geology in the world. Viticulture is a different story down here; thin, infertile soils overlay ancient rocks and sands, and hot summers are moderated by cooling sea breezes from the Gulf of St. Vincent. The warm, dry climate of McLaren Vale lends itself particularly well to later ripening varieties like the Shiraz and Grenache we grow on our Blewitt Springs vineyard; the long summer days provide an abundance of time for flavours to develop and concentrate.

Adelaide Hills

The Adelaide Hills wine region is located east of the city of Adelaide, stretching across the Mount Lofty Ranges for more than 70km from Mount Compass in the south, to Williamstown and Springton in the north.

As we see them today, the Adelaide Hills are all that remains of a period of great geological instability which occurred between 500 & 870 million years ago. Eons’ worth of deposition and sedimentation over the landscape were followed by a long period of downfaulting and mountain building, varying the topography of the region, and resulting in an extraordinarily diverse place to grow grapes.

Due to the diversity in topography and soil type, this long and narrow wine region encompasses many microclimates, changing drastically from north to south, and sometimes even from one block to another. The elevation of the Hills is what makes it appreciably cooler up here than down on the Adelaide plains during the growing season, and also much wetter during the winter. Cooler days and nights over the growing season mean a slower ripening process for the fruit, resulting in elegant and balanced wines with fresh flavours and high natural acidity. With careful planning and decision making in the vineyard, we can take advantage of these disparate pockets of dirt to make wines that truly reflect place.