Peter Schell and Magali Gely are a husband-and-wife team from NZ who came to Australia in the early ’90s to study oenology and marketing at Roseworthy College. They have spent 4 vintages making wine in France, mainly in the south where Magali’s family were vignerons for generations near Montpellier. The focus at Spinifex is the red varieties that dominate in the south of France: mataro (a synonym for mourvèdre), grenache, shiraz and cinsaut. The wines are made in open fermenters, basket pressed, with partial wild (indigenous) fermentation and relatively long post-ferment maceration. A new cellar door opened in '23. JAMES HALLIDAY
Pete and his partner Magali Gely operate what I think is the best new-wave of small-scale Barossa wine companies to emerge at the beginning of the 21st century… These weren’t big, blockbuster, showy wines designed to impress. They were wines that managed to take the best of the Barossa’s sometimes forgotten varietal traditions and fuse them onto a very European flavour sensibility. MAX ALLEN
