Spring Seed Wines are made from grapes lovingly grown in our family's organic vineyard, located in the premium wine region of McLaren Vale, South Australia. The vineyard was established in the early 1970's by Peter and Anthea Bosworth, and is now owned and run by their son Joch, who began the conversion to organic viticulture in 1995. The vines are fully certified 'A' grade organic by Australian Certified Organic, a process that takes four years and involves yearly audits and random sampling of produce.

The Spring Seed Wine labels are unashamedly inspired by vintage flower seed packets created at the turn of the last century. The colour, clarity and beauty of the original seed packets are quite remarkable. We chose three different flower images to adorn each one of our McLaren Vale, simply because they are quite lovely. The Four O'Clock Chardonnay displays the Four O'Clock (Mirabilis jalapa), Gaillardia (Gaillardia pulchella) and the Brachycome (Iberidifolia).

Vintage 2014: Vintage 2014 was a season of extremes for us all in McLaren Vale. We had great winter rains which gave us a full soil profile in time for a dry and windy spring. They don’t call it windy Willunga for nothing – I think if we’d had a set of wind chimes on the property, we would have heard them all day and night from September to January. We had a series of very hot days in January, followed by about 45mm of rain over a 48 hour period in early February which slowed ripening of our red grapes right down. We had picked all of our white grapes prior to the rain ‘event’ and so we had a decent break between whites and reds, like the good old days. There was no splitting of any of the grapes left on the vine after the rain, mercifully, either. Joch’s analysis of 2014 is that it was a gentleman’s vintage – everything came in slowly and in order, not like the mad rush of 2013. Every vintage is different; truism of our time, and of our industry.

Winemaking: ‘Four O’clock’ is all about the art of blending different components of Chardonnay together from our vineyards, all of which have been made in subtly different ways. The aim is to make a wine which is greater than the sum of its parts. Some of the components are fermented in stainless steel, some finish their ferment in old oak barrels and some undergo a ‘wild’ ferment (they are fermented by the wild yeasts which are present in the vineyard). All wines are handled oxidatively, and are very gently pressed. We keep all batches of wine on solids after fermentation, to further protect them from oxidation. This also helps create a more complex wine. None of the batches were allowed to go through the secondary malolactic fermentation, and none were matured in oak.