Chaffey Bros

Perhaps surprisingly, the eponymous brothers in question were not winemakers but engineers. George and William Benjamin Chaffey were Canadian-born hydraulic engineers who arrived in Australia in 1886 with an audacious plan to draw water from the Murray River and turn semi-arid country into productive farmland. Their irrigation schemes at Mildura and Renmark made large parts of the inland habitable for crops and, in time, for vines. Without the Chaffeys’ water, the Riverland wine industry as it exists would be unimaginable. They were iconoclasts and risk-takers, and the family has clearly never quite lost the disposition.

Daniel Chaffey Hartwig was born and raised in the Barossa and has worked his way up, picking grapes in school holidays, working the Penfolds cellar door, then spending years as a bulk wine merchant and consultant before founding Chaffey Bros. in 2008. He was joined in 2012 by his brother-in-law Theo Engela, and more recently by the winemaker Huon Fechner, himself a seventh-generation grower.

The trio describe themselves, only half-joking, as part perfumers, part historians, part mad scientists. The house style belongs to what the Barossa has taken to calling its New Wave: minimal-intervention winemaking, with an emphasis on aromatic and textural whites from the cooler Eden Valley, alongside the expected Barossa reds, fruit drawn from old, low-yielding vineyards farmed by multi-generational grower families. Chaffey Bros owns no vineyards itslef, instead relationships with growers.