Growing & Making

At Torbreck we work in partnership with the people of the Barossa who grow our fruit, always aiming to get the very best out of their vineyard sites.

We do this by constantly seeking to understand the difference between all of these special places in the Barossa – how they react to the seasons and how this combination of soil and climate and farming experience is reflected in unique grape flavours.

This requires patience, allowing these vineyards to achieve physiological ripeness and only harvesting at a point when the fruit is at its most expressive.

It also means a gentle, restrained hand in the physical winemaking process, minimising human intervention and wine movement, so that we capture the integrity of every single block. 

In keeping with this respect for the vineyard and the wine, there is no fining or filtration and barrel maturation takes as long as it takes.

We are simply custodians, enhancing the innate expressiveness of the wines and enabling them to reveal over time, their individual origins and personality.

 

The Barrels

The 225 litre oak barriques selected for the maturation of The Laird are considered to be some of the finest in the world - Dominique Laurent ‘Magic Casks’. Dominique Laurent is an extraordinary individual – a truly great French winemaker he was so frustrated by the sales-driven and mass-production methods of the larger cooperages in France that he decided to make his own barrels.

He left nothing to chance when developing his cooperage, selecting a site that with a steep elevation exposed to the wind and rain on the côte at the edge of La Forêt de Citeaux. 

The coopers he selected to craft his barrels had deep, proud ties to artisanal barrel production and are driven by traditional techniques. The oak was personally harvested from Forêt de Tronçais in Allier, specifically selected from the forest’s original area known to produce the finest oak.

The oak trunks were split by hand and then hand split again into staves that are almost twice as thick as traditional machine split staves, perfect for long barrel maturation. These were then aged for 48 to 54 months at a location that is already more exposed and weathered than the average maturation site to ensure maximum seasoning.

After this aging, the staves were hand-made into barrels. As part of this process, they were heated over three differing flames for several hours. This again is much longer than the standard process – however it does not result in a heavy toast because of the remarkable density of the wood.