Travis Tausend

ADELAIDE HILLS, SOUTH AUSTRALIA

A true maverick amongst the vignerons in Adelaide Hills. Seeing winemaking as an art, Travis’s wines are filled with emotion and energy. The wines are always different, not only due to vintage variations but also from Travis as his winemaking approach and him as a winemaker continue to grow.

Travis highly regards the history of the land, the environmental flow, the cultural resonance and the spiritual weight that weave a narrative in the vineyard. With this in mind, he considers what he does a responsibility to care for the land and to improve it into better condition for future generations. 

He makes wines with very little modern machinery, making use of a hand destemmer and a hand-driven press, lots of buckets, 2 hoses, a stack of old barrels and some tanks. The visit to his cellar was one of the most inspiring experiences as we had the opportunity to witness the honesty and sincerity of his philosophy, with them being beautifully expressed in his wines. His focus and intention have involved some input from Sebastian Riffault and Daniel Sage for the recent vintage, with the 2017 bringing an incredible maturity and a complexity that is immensely satisfying.