The vision is to Torbreck Vintners, which was founded in 1994, was born out of a desire to create some of the greatest wines in the world by using the incredibly old, dry-grown, Shiraz vineyards that surround the Barossa Valley. Securing these vineyards initially involved share-farming the property, a practice which involves paying the owner a percentage of the market rate for their grapes in return for managing the vineyard. It was this share-farming principle, together with their selection of some of the most highly prized vineyards, that formed the founding pillars of Torbreck’s incredible international success. The vineyards, in particular, enabled them to source some of the very best fruit in the Barossa Valley, which is home to some of the oldest and most precious vines in the world. Provenance is everything to Torbreck. They believe that the Barossa Valley, with its gentle Mediterranean climate and 175 year history of Silesian and English winemaking, is most exciting place in the world to make wine. There is a European sense of tradition here that means that vines planted in the 1840s – many of them Rhone varieties such as Shiraz, Grenache and Mourvédre– still thrive and bear fruit of unique concentration and flavour.

It was by drawing on this tradition that Torbreck produced their first wine, Run Rig, in 1995 which was crushed from just three tonnes of Shiraz and Viognier grapes.