Seppeltsfield

Seppeltsfield is one of Australia’s most historic estates, a grand nineteenth-century Barossa property famous above all for a single, extraordinary tradition: it is the only winery in the world to release a 100-year-old wine every single year.

A Prussian merchant in the Barossa

The estate was founded in 1851 by Joseph Ernst Seppelt, a Prussian merchant who had dealt in tobacco, snuff and liqueurs and emigrated with his family in 1849 to escape the unrest of the time. After his first plan for the land failed, the family settled to grape-growing in the Barossa Valley, and Seppeltsfield grew over the following decades into one of the largest and most imposing wine estates in the country — an avenue of palms, bluestone cellars, and a gravity-flow winery built into the hillside.

The 100-year-old Para tradition

Seppeltsfield’s defining act came in 1878. To mark the completion of the cellar, Joseph’s son Benno Seppelt set aside a single 500-litre puncheon of his finest wine and declared it would be left to mature, untouched, for a full 100 years. He then did the same the next year, and the next — and every year since. The result is the Centennial Collection: an unbroken lineage of single-vintage Para Tawny, one barrel for every year from 1878 to the present, each released at exactly a century old. No other winery on earth can pour a 100-year-old wine of its own making every year, and it is the estate’s most remarkable asset.

That fortified heritage is the key to the estate’s identity. Tawny — long, oxidative, barrel-aged fortified wine — was for a century the pinnacle of Australian winemaking, and Seppeltsfield’s oak halls are its living museum (see oak cooperage for the wood chemistry that drives such long maturation).

From fortified to table

Like the Barossa itself, Seppeltsfield now makes acclaimed table wines from the varieties its fortified tradition was built on — Grenache, Shiraz and Mataro (Mourvèdre). Its old-vine Grenache, in particular, rides the modern revival of the variety: the same fruit that once went to fortified is now bottled as a fragrant, medium-bodied dry red, a direct line from the estate’s nineteenth-century roots to one of Australian wine’s most exciting contemporary categories.