James Halliday Australian Wine Companion 2018 Edition
Peter Schell and Magali Gely are a husband and wife team from NZ who came to Australia in the early 1990s to study oenology and marketing at Roseworthy College. They have spent four vintages making wine in France, mainly in the south, where Magalis family were vignerons for generations near Montpellier.
The focus at Spinifex is the red varieties that dominate in the south of France: mataro (more correctly mourvedre), grenache, shiraz and cinsaut. The wine is made in open fermenters, basket-pressed, with partial wild (indigenous) fermentations, and relatively long post-ferment maceration. This is a very old approach, but nowadays la mode. The current releases are superb, the best so far to come from this top- class producer. Exports to the UK, Canada, Belgium, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and NZ.