The yeasts living here have been shaped by this specific place: its altitude, its soils and its seasons. When they ferment our fruit, they carry that imprint into the wine. Our job is to get ourselves out of the way.
Each of our wines is fermented using only wild yeasts that naturally occur in our vineyard. Our straightforward winemaking journey started with a conviction to clearly communicating in this amazing place.
What is Straightforward winemaking?
For us, winemaking should be straightforward: nothing added, nothing taken away unless absolutely necessary. In conventional winemaking, a producer can legally draw on more than 50 approved additives and processes. For example, commercial yeasts to control fermentation, fining agents to clarify the wine, acidification to adjust balance, filtration to ensure shelf stability. Each step tidies the wine, but can also, smooth away the very characteristics that make it individual.
Low intervention winemaking takes the opposite view: that great wine begins with great fruit and healthy soils, and that the winemaker’s job is to guide the process rather than engineer the outcome. It demands more skill, and attention because there is nowhere to hide.
All of our wines are fermented using wild yeast from the vineyard itself. No commercial yeast strains. Wild fermentation produces more complex, site-expressive wines, and it means one of the most critical stages of winemaking is driven entirely from within the property. No fining agents. Minimal filtration.
We avoid it because every time you add something to a wine — a commercial yeast strain, a fining agent, a synthetic treatment — you’re nudging it away from where it came from. And where this wine comes from is worth paying attention to.
Nine hundred metres above sea level. Deep red volcanic soils. A sky that changes its mind six times a day. That’s what we’re trying to put in a bottle.
The Vineyard Comes First
We haven’t used pesticides since the year of planting. Beeswing’s Hill has been farmed fully organically for five vintages now. Synthetic fertilisers are gone too, replaced with composted organic cow manure from the Rangers Valley feedlot just down the road.
Undervine herbicides have been phased out across the vineyard. The only exception is around vines replanted after the 2019 bushfire, where young roots still need time before they can hold their own.
Healthy soil is the point of all of this. Healthy soil holds carbon, holds water, builds vine resilience, and crucially, holds the microbial life that makes the next part of this story possible.
The Beauty of Wild Yeast
Every wine we make is fermented using the wild yeasts which have accumulated on the grapes from the vineyard itself. No commercial strains, no inoculation, no shortcuts.
Wild fermentation is slower and less predictable than conventional winemaking. It requires more attention, more patience and produces wines which are distinct, complex and highly specific to the area. Commercial yeast is designed to be reliable and neutral, and what we’re after is neither of those things.
The yeasts living in this vineyard have been shaped by this specific place: its altitude, its soils, its seasons, its microclimate. When they ferment our fruit, they carry that imprint into the wine.
In the Bottle
For our wines, the only additive used across the entire winemaking process is a small amount of sulphur at bottling as a preservative. No fining agents. Minimal filtration.
What ends up in the glass is as close as we can get to an honest expression of this land, this vintage, this season.
That’s what straight forward winemaking means to us. Not a label. Not a trend. Just the clearest, most direct route possible between the vineyard and the wine.
Explore the Topper’s Mountain range at toppers.com.au/shop. Every bottle in our range is made this way.
Read more about our approach to farming and carbon neutrality in This Year’s Vintage Is Six Weeks Early.