Wild Folk Nouveau Shiraz | Padthaway, Australia

Wild Folk Nouveau are minimal-intervention, natural wines made with wild yeasts, no added preservatives or sulphites and are bottled unfined and unfiltered. They afford easy, early, ‘Nouveau’ drinking - but can be kept.

If the majority of your experiences with natural wine have been shaded by the fact they taste funky, feral and borderline faulty then rejoice, Wild Folk wines are a pure expression of the variety and the vineyard. This is a natural wine that should appeal well beyond dedicated natural-wine drinkers. Fruit is nurtured in the vineyard, handled gently in the winery and made with great care and attention whilst celebrating the ‘less is more’ approach to winemaking.

This Shiraz has the richness people look for in Barossa-style wines, without covering the fruit in sweet oak or excessive winemaking polish - it’s an unnaturally good natural wine.

Grapes were handpicked and sorted before being placed into open fermenters, where wild yeasts initiated the fermentation and the juice subjected to plunging to gently draw colour, flavour and tannin from the skins. Once fermentation was complete, the wine was transferred to stainless steel rather than oak and bottled relatively young. It received minimal additions and was neither fined nor filtered, with no added preservatives used during production.

South Australia wines have a reputation of Barossa Shiraz or Coonawarra Cabernet. The Padthaway region rarely gets the same recognition - but it should. It lies at the entrance to the Limestone Coast, South Australia's cool-climate wine corridor that stretches south from Coonawarra toward the Southern Ocean. It's a flat landscape, where beneath the loam surface lies limestone — the same geological foundation that gives the Limestone Coast its reputation for producing wines of genuine elegance and intensity. The cooler temperatures in Padthaway helps preserve the natural acidity and delicate red fruit characters, where warmer regions might push towards something heavier.