Some wines are made to be sold. Ours, for three generations, were made to be kept.
There is a stretch of ground in South Australia where the light falls a certain way in the late afternoon, and the vines have grown old enough to have memory. This is where our family has worked the earth for sixty years. It does not announce itself. You could pass it on the road and see only rows of old vines and a low house among them, and never know that wine the world has admired began here.
with two people who had almost nothing.
Sarantos came from Limnos, an island of wind and stone in the northern Aegean, and learned his trade as a carpenter before the sea carried him to Mykonos and then, in his youth, to Australia. He was a man who measured twice and spoke once, who believed that anything worth making was worth making to outlast the maker.
Constantina came from Kalamata, in the south of the Peloponnese, where the olive groves run to the water and the families who tend them count their wealth in patience. She had been raised to understand that the land gives to those who wait, and never to those who hurry it.
They met in 1961, in South Australia, their hands stained with another family’s harvest. Two Greeks far from home, picking grapes that would carry someone else’s name. They married the work, and they married each other, and they made a quiet promise that one day the vines they tended would be their own.
For four years they saved everything. And when at last they could, they bought a single block of land, unremarkable to any eye but theirs, and they planted it by hand, vine by vine, in the cool of the mornings before the heat came. In the autumn of 1965 they gathered the first grapes from their own ground. Nina and Steve, as their new country had come to call them, standing together in a vineyard that, after everything, was finally theirs.
Their son Bill was born into the rows. He learned the turn of the seasons before he learned to read, learned which vines gave their best in a dry year and which needed coaxing, learned from his father that you do not rush what the land intends to give slowly. In 1985, beside the vineyard his parents had planted with their own hands, he built a winery. And from that ground, the family began to make wine not only for itself, but for the world.
The fruit was extraordinary, and the people whose business is knowing such things came to know it. For decades our wine travelled quietly into the great cellars of Europe and beyond, into bottles that carried other names, other crests, other histories. The world raised its glasses to wine that began in our soil and never knew to thank us. We did not mind. The wine was the work, and the work was enough.
we did not send.
In every vintage, Sarantos set aside a little of the best for the family’s own table, and when he was gone, Bill kept the custom, and keeps it still. The oldest vines, the ones Nina and Steve had planted. The few barrels that rose above all the others in a given year. The wine too fine to surrender to another name. These never left us. They were opened on the nights that mattered, among the people who had built this place, and they were judged by the only measure the family ever trusted: whether the wine was good enough to pour for its own.
Three generations have held the finest of it back.
What you hold now is that wine. The one we kept. Released, for the first time in sixty years, under the name it should always have carried.
Moulara. Our name, and at last, yours.