By Dylan De Jong

Grampians winemaker SubRosa has been smashing goals this past year.   

A young player in the industry, SubRosa owners and partners Adam Louder and Nancy Panter have already received a great deal of praise from Australia’s most prominent wine reviewers. 

Last month, revered Australian wine critic Huon Hooke reviewed SubRosa’s 2018 batch of viognier as best in the country. 

This comes after leading wine critic James Halliday rated the winery as one of the best new wineries in the 2019 Halliday Wine Companion. 

He said SubRosa’s wine had potential to ‘win gold medals galore, should it enter wine shows’, while scoring each of its wines between 92 and 96 points. 

This year, the winery retained its high ratings and featured in the February-March Halliday Wine Companion 50th edition magazine.

SubRosa quickly built a strong reputation in the Grampians and Pyrenees regions after the couple started the label in 2015.

Ms Panter said she was delighted to be able to produce an award-winning wine that had the potential to showcase the region. 

“We work hard to make the best wines we can using the high quality grapes grown here in the Grampians and Pyrenees and we’re proud to be promoting the region through our beautiful wines,” she said. 

“Adam is an exceptionally talented winemaker. He has completed 34 harvests at only 39 years of age – that’s a lot of hard work.

“We aim to make delicious wines that are well priced, so it’s wonderful to see reviewers like James Halliday, Huon Hooke and Mike Bennie recognising that our wines are great value for money.” 

Continuing with its success, SubRosa shipped a pallet of its handmade and hand-labelled wine to Japan in April.

Ms Panter said interest in SubRosa’s wine was also expanding further into international markets. 

“We’ve also had interest in our wine from Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK and the United States – SubRosa has plans to explore exporting to these and other countries,” she said. “We are excited that our handcrafted wine is selling well in Japan and that our customer has ordered a second pallet of wine within 12 months. The value of the shipment to Japan also increased by 30 percent. 

“It has been a steep learning curve for us – Japan is our first export market.” 

The entire May 13, 2020 edition of The Weekly Advertiser is available online. READ IT HERE!