History
Harvesting grapes & cleaning the winery in the early days
It was in 1958 when Domenico and his wife Paula bought their first vineyard site of just 5.6 hectares. In 1968, Domenico and Paula purchased the original McLaren Flat school property of 20 hectares and in the years following a further 12 hectares of adjoining land was purchased, making the Scarpantoni’s some of the largest private growers in the region at the time.
In 1979 the Scarpantoni Estate winery was built with the aid Dom and Paula’s two sons Michael and Filippo on the McLaren Flat property. The very first Scarpantoni labelled release was actually made a few years earlier in 1975, though the wine was made at a friend’s nearby winery. In the early years after the winery had been built only a small percentage of each harvest was made as Scarpantoni wines as the family needed to make contract wines for other companies to help make ends meet and pay for the production of their own wines.
Scarpantoni labels circa 1980
The following three decades have seen major expansions to Scarpantoni Wines including the purchase of more vineyards and land around the region and the restoration of a winery and vineyard property in the heart of McLaren Vale (Oxenberry Farm), including the creation of a wetland and a new cellar door, plus the ongoing restoration of the very first house built in McLaren Vale. Scarpantoni Wines is very much a family business and every step of production, from viticulture to the packaged product is done entirely on the premises, which is a relatively unique situation in Australia for a boutique winery. It gives the family total control over every stage of the winemaking process and ensures that the highest standards are maintained. Australian wine writer Campbell Mattinson visited the winery back in 2003 and posted the story below on his website The Wine Front and to this day much of what he is written is very much how the winery and business still operates.
Article: Scarpantoni: Making wine their own way
By Campbell Mattinson
Amid all the hoo-ha of top-dollar wines it’s invigorating to visit a winery like Scarpantoni in McLaren Vale – a unique winery in many respects but beloved for its excellent shiraz that sells, bless it, for $22 a bottle.
To give you an idea of just how cheap that is, let Michael Scarpantoni put it this way: “In relative terms we’re now selling our wines cheaper than we were ten years ago. To survive, to be a boutique producer, you just have to keep your margins finer and finer.”
There aren’t too many businesses that could say, and do, a thing like that and expect to stay in business, but then Scarpantoni is by no means a run-of-the-mill operation. They do things their own way at Scarpantoni, and everything they do is based around keeping control of the wine production process – the kind of control that can only have a positive influence on the wine’s quality.
“We do everything in-house, so we can keep everything viable,” Michael Scarpantoni says. “We’ve always invested in high quality equipment, and we don’t stand still – we even now have our own in-house bottling line. We’re a 30,000 case business off virtually all our own fruit, we can pick exactly when we want because we have all our own picking equipment, we don’t have to wait for, or rely on, anyone.”
It’s a winery worth visiting, and not just because of its bizarre location – it’s smack bang in the middle of McLaren Vale suburbia, the only difference between it and the other houses in the street being that where most have a clothesline the Scarpantoni’s have vineyards and a winery.
And it’s an unusual winery – and oh so efficient. If you’re going to go the modern route, in a boutique environment, then this is the way to do it. “One of the main difference between our winery and most others is that with ours, everything is inside under cover – the wine tank farm, the receiving area, everything. And because of the way we have it set up it only takes three people to operate it – you only need three people to do the whole vintage.”
It’s the kind of winery that’s an engineer’s dream – if a machine can be designed to make the labour component of the winery easier, then it is commissioned and installed at Scarpantoni. It’s a philosophy that extends into the maturation process too: the entire winery itself is double insulated.
And the accompanying warehouse is sunk three metres underground, to operate as a kind of cold bank. It’s frightening, when you walk around the Australian wine industry, to see how many barrel sheds are uninsulated and hot, to see how much wine stock is stored in seriously poor conditions. In this context it’s like a dream walking into Scarpantoni – things are done properly here.
The Scarpantoni story is a simple one: they started crushing and selling wine in 1979, though just about all of this was sold as bulk to the big companies. They gradually started selling wine under their own label, and from the early 1990s onwards have stopped selling any wine as bulk; the aim, purely, has been to become an estate label.
“We’re very conservative,” Michael says. “The only difference between Scarpantoni now and Scarpantoni ten years ago is that we’re now selling more wine with our own label on it.”
Scarpantoni vines are planted mainly on light, infertile soils, the vines used for the “Block 3” shiraz now 65 years old. “The beauty of sandy soil is that if you dig right down, you find that a lot of moisture is retained. The trick with this kind of soil is that it’s very difficult to get vines started, but once they’re established they can survive just about anything. You’d back vines in this kind of soil in a drought before vines anywhere else.”
Still, the Scarpantoni’s have put a lot of work into the quality of their soils, mostly with the aid of various organic materials. “Our soils now are a lot better quality than they were 20 years ago,” Michael says.
As to the ageing of Scarpantoni’s reds, Michael says this: “I reckon they’re at their best in the first 18 months or so, and then after 10 years. If you ask me what I think of the 1998, I wouldn’t know – because I haven’t tasted it for a while. It’s the same with the 2000 releases, which everyone wrote off because the wines were lighter, but when I look at it now it’s getting brighter and fuller – I think a good while down the track it’s going to be something really interesting.”
On the 2002 vintage, Michael says this: “To me, it’s a cabernet year more than a shiraz year. The cabernets are looking outstanding all over.”
To give you an idea of just how cheap that is, let Michael Scarpantoni put it this way: “In relative terms we’re now selling our wines cheaper than we were ten years ago. To survive, to be a boutique producer, you just have to keep your margins finer and finer.”
There aren’t too many businesses that could say, and do, a thing like that and expect to stay in business, but then Scarpantoni is by no means a run-of-the-mill operation. They do things their own way at Scarpantoni, and everything they do is based around keeping control of the wine production process – the kind of control that can only have a positive influence on the wine’s quality.
“We do everything in-house, so we can keep everything viable,” Michael Scarpantoni says. “We’ve always invested in high quality equipment, and we don’t stand still – we even now have our own in-house bottling line. We’re a 30,000 case business off virtually all our own fruit, we can pick exactly when we want because we have all our own picking equipment, we don’t have to wait for, or rely on, anyone.”
It’s a winery worth visiting, and not just because of its bizarre location – it’s smack bang in the middle of McLaren Vale suburbia, the only difference between it and the other houses in the street being that where most have a clothesline the Scarpantoni’s have vineyards and a winery.
And it’s an unusual winery – and oh so efficient. If you’re going to go the modern route, in a boutique environment, then this is the way to do it. “One of the main difference between our winery and most others is that with ours, everything is inside under cover – the wine tank farm, the receiving area, everything. And because of the way we have it set up it only takes three people to operate it – you only need three people to do the whole vintage.”
It’s the kind of winery that’s an engineer’s dream – if a machine can be designed to make the labour component of the winery easier, then it is commissioned and installed at Scarpantoni. It’s a philosophy that extends into the maturation process too: the entire winery itself is double insulated.
And the accompanying warehouse is sunk three metres underground, to operate as a kind of cold bank. It’s frightening, when you walk around the Australian wine industry, to see how many barrel sheds are uninsulated and hot, to see how much wine stock is stored in seriously poor conditions. In this context it’s like a dream walking into Scarpantoni – things are done properly here.
The Scarpantoni story is a simple one: they started crushing and selling wine in 1979, though just about all of this was sold as bulk to the big companies. They gradually started selling wine under their own label, and from the early 1990s onwards have stopped selling any wine as bulk; the aim, purely, has been to become an estate label.
“We’re very conservative,” Michael says. “The only difference between Scarpantoni now and Scarpantoni ten years ago is that we’re now selling more wine with our own label on it.”
Scarpantoni vines are planted mainly on light, infertile soils, the vines used for the “Block 3” shiraz now 65 years old. “The beauty of sandy soil is that if you dig right down, you find that a lot of moisture is retained. The trick with this kind of soil is that it’s very difficult to get vines started, but once they’re established they can survive just about anything. You’d back vines in this kind of soil in a drought before vines anywhere else.”
Still, the Scarpantoni’s have put a lot of work into the quality of their soils, mostly with the aid of various organic materials. “Our soils now are a lot better quality than they were 20 years ago,” Michael says.
As to the ageing of Scarpantoni’s reds, Michael says this: “I reckon they’re at their best in the first 18 months or so, and then after 10 years. If you ask me what I think of the 1998, I wouldn’t know – because I haven’t tasted it for a while. It’s the same with the 2000 releases, which everyone wrote off because the wines were lighter, but when I look at it now it’s getting brighter and fuller – I think a good while down the track it’s going to be something really interesting.”
On the 2002 vintage, Michael says this: “To me, it’s a cabernet year more than a shiraz year. The cabernets are looking outstanding all over.”
