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Husband and wife team Peter Schell and Magali Gely started Spinifex in 2001 with the focus squarely on making regional Barossa and Eden Valley wines from Mediterranean grape varieties. The brilliant quality of the wines is today widely recognised and last year Spinifex won the 2009 Penguin Wine Guide Winery of the Year AND Wine of the Year and Peter was nominated for GT Winemaker of the Year.

If Spinifex is not one of the most exciting Australian producers to have cropped up in the last decade then we don’t know much about wine. It is testament to how much we respect the wines of Peter and Magali that we have been badgering them to let us handle their wines for almost as long as Spinifex has existed. In short, we rate them in the top few Australian producers and we’re obviously not the only ones. We also think that they are a historically significant producer as they are one of the few producing artisanal quantities of full bodied red wines that manage to retain genuine complexity, savouriness and sense of place. Sounds simple, and yet in an ocean of sweet, oaky South Australian reds, Spinifex are a beacon of hope. To say we are thrilled to be working with Pete & Magali’s wines is a gross understatement.

"Ten of the best new wineries: Wow what an impressive newcomer this is, owned by New Zealand-born Peter Schell and French-born wife Magali Gely. After graduation from Roseworthy they worked for four vintages in the south of France, and when they established Spinifex, it was only natural to focus on Mourvèdre, Grenache, Shiraz and Cinsault. Great wine and immaculate packaging is a heady mixture... So far as I am concerned Spinifex out-Torbrecks Torbreck" James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion, 2008

“It seems that Spinifex wines can do no wrong. Funny thing is that I took a while to be convinced of the Spinifex mastery … but I’m well and truly on board now.” Campbell Mattinson, May 2009