Henschke

Henschke is one of Australia’s oldest and most respected family-owned wineries, six generations deep in the cool, high country of the Eden Valley. It is the custodian of Hill of Grace — a single vineyard whose old Shiraz vines make one of only two wines routinely spoken of alongside Penfolds Grange as Australia’s greatest red.

Six generations in the Eden Valley

The estate was founded in 1868 by Johann Christian Henschke, a Silesian Lutheran who, like many of his community, had emigrated to South Australia to escape religious persecution and settled in the hills east of the Barossa. The family has made wine on the same Eden Valley ground ever since. The current custodians are the fifth generation: Stephen Henschke, winemaker since 1979, and his wife Prue Henschke, the viticulturist whose organic and biodynamic work in the vineyards transformed the estate’s fruit quality and made Henschke an early Australian leader in that farming.

The Eden Valley itself is the key. A cool, elevated pocket of the greater Barossa zone, it sits high enough that its wide diurnal range holds acidity and perfume in fruit that would be far broader on the warm valley floor below.

Hill of Grace

The Hill of Grace vineyard is eight hectares in the tiny hamlet of Parrot Hill, and its story is one of continuity. The oldest vines were planted around 1860 — pre-phylloxera, ungrafted Shiraz that has been cropping for over a century and a half. The name is a translation of Gnadenberg, the German name of the district and its Lutheran church across the road.

For generations the fruit went into blends. It was Cyril Henschke, the fourth generation, who in 1958 first bottled it on its own as a single-vineyard wine — a radical act at a time when Australian reds were almost universally multi-region blends. Hill of Grace is the counter-argument to the Penfolds philosophy: where Penfolds built greatness by blending across regions, Henschke built it by bottling one extraordinary patch of ground, untouched, year after year. Mount Edelstone, another old-vine Eden Valley Shiraz, is the estate’s second single-vineyard benchmark.

The style

Henschke’s reds are built on old-vine concentration, careful oak that frames rather than dominates, and the natural freshness the cool site provides — wines of depth and perfume made to age for decades. The estate is proof that the single-vineyard idea, so central to European fine wine, has a genuine and very old Australian home.