Meet the winemaker

How Chris Carpenter is building upon Hickinbotham’s impressive legacy in McLaren Vale

By Andrew Zuccala

15 hours ago

Chris Carpenter has been a winemaker at Hickinbotham since 2012, adding to the vineyard's prestigious Australian wine legacy.

Hickinbotham in McLaren Vale’s Clarendon district has long played an important role in the Australian wine industry’s development. Alan Robb Hickinbotham, Australia’s first wine science lecturer at Roseworthy College, and his son, viticulturist Alan David Hickinbotham, first planted the dry-grown vineyard in 1971, quickly building it into one of the country’s finest.

Initially, some of the fruit was sold to Australia’s biggest producers and used to make iconic wines such as Penfolds Grange and Hardy’s Eileen Hardy Shiraz. The sale to Jackson Family Wines in 2012 brought with it one of California’s veteran winemakers Chris Carpenter. Chris is well respected for his work with cabernet – he's known as the ‘cabernet master’ – as well as shiraz and merlot. Working alongside Pete Fraser, of the renowned Yangarra Estate Vineyard, the formidable duo began producing wines from the site under the Hickinbotham label.

Hickinbotham vineyard

“When Pete asked me to come over here, he knew I wasn’t going to make Cali-style wines in Australia,” Chris says. But what Chris didn’t know at the time, however, was just how much Australia would influence his own winemaking.

He came to understand and know the various plots of the unique Clarendon site intimately, a site characterised by its elevation, ancient soils and the cooling breezes off the Saint Vincent Gulf. His learnings were ultimately fast-tracked by the knowledge imparted from the incredible winemaking and viticultural talent in the region.

This led towards producing wines of place, by focusing maximum attention on the vineyard and minimal intervention in the winery. He adopted these practices at Hickinbotham to make top-quality and ageworthy wines. 

Chris Carpenter

The team also made additional changes on the property, most notably planting other varieties including cabernet franc, grenache, petit verdot and malbec. They have also identified the high-performing blocks and rows in the vineyard to create the single site CC208 Cabernet Sauvignon and CS222 Shiraz wines. These explorative winemaking ventures aside, it's Hickinbotham's classic Australian cabernet shiraz blend – The Peake – that is still one of their most important wines.

Last month, the Halliday team had the privilege of welcoming Chris into our office to take us through a comparative tasting of the 2015 and 2022 vintages. To learn more about Hickinbotham's wines, see Marcus Ellis's tasting notes below.

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