S.C. Pannell

Stephen Pannell spent eight years as chief red winemaker at one of Australia's largest wine companies before deciding McLaren Vale's Mediterranean climate and jumbled ancient geology deserved a broader palette than shiraz and cabernet alone. Since 2004 he and wife Fiona have built a McLaren Vale label around grenache, tempranillo, touriga nacional, aglianico, nero d'avola and fiano, varieties that read as adventurous locally but are simply common sense in a place this warm and dry. The results have not gone unnoticed: four Bushing Trophies for best wine of show in the Vale, a Jimmy Watson Trophy, and a spot among Decanter's fifty most influential figures in wine. None of it reads as trophy-chasing at the cellar door on Olivers Road, open Friday to Monday from late morning with walk-ins welcome and a tapas kitchen turning out food built to sit alongside the wine rather than around it. It is a working demonstration of a region rethinking what it is capable of growing, made by someone who helped start that rethink.