Living on the edge: Peter Dredge, Dr Edge

When Peter Dredge was in his final year of high school in Adelaide, he was hit in the temple with an errant discus during athletics training, which fractured his skull, severed his cochlear nerve and put him in hospital and rehab for months. “I was a bit of a jock, I wanted to play professional AFL football and be a physiotherapist,” he says. But the accident, which left him with ongoing balance issues and permanent hearing loss in his left ear, ended any hopes of a career in sport.

“I tried to play football after I went back to high school, but I couldn’t hear where things were coming from, and whenever I took my eyes off the ground, I’d become dizzy. I couldn’t focus without feeling nauseous.” 

It took Peter two years to finish year 12, but still he left school with no greater clarity around his future. “I was a little bit lost,” he says, and “not a very happy chappy, underneath the scenes.” A lifeline came in the form of Brian Croser. His mum and Brian knew each other a little, and after hearing about his condition and knowing he was strong in the sciences, Brian offered Peter a summer job in the lab at Petaluma. He calls it his sliding doors moment. “I got into winemaking by accident, literally.” 

Peter Dredge. Photo credit: Milton Wordley.

He worked at Petaluma for almost 12 years, in a variety of roles across lab, cellars and winery. “As a teenager with obvious head-trauma issues and related-trauma issues, it was nice to be mentored and brought into an environment that was very friendly,” he says. Throughout, he completed the winemaking degree at Adelaide Uni, and worked a vintage at Dr Loosen in Germany. In 2006, he was promoted to senior white winemaker and got the experimental Petaluma Project Co. up and running. By the time he resigned in 2009, he was making sparkling, too.

It was also at Petaluma that he was first called Dr Edge. Few read into the moniker today as more than a play on his surname – in fairness, it’s hard to picture the charming, genuine, amiable, irreverent and funny-as-hell Peter ‘Dredgey’ Dredge any other way – but it was more a reflection on his mental state when he started in ’97. “I was very shy, I couldn’t hear, I was still coming out of a deep depression,” he says. “The winemakers called me Dr Edge because I was on the edge. They couldn’t tell if I was an intelligent, funny, aspiring winemaker, or on the edge of going up into the bell tower and shooting them all.”

Dr Edge labels feature artwork by Massive Attack's Robert del Naja.

That he was listening to a lot of “moody, depressing trip-hop” by artists like Portishead, DJ Shadow and Massive Attack didn’t help his cause, but was integral to his recovery. Among the albums he “inflicted” on the Petaluma cellars was a compilation series ironically called Headz, which featured cover artwork by Massive Attack band member, artist and renowned philanthropist Robert del Naja. Peter had been chewing on the idea of starting his own label during his final years at Petaluma, although at the time it was just a “snippet of a pipe dream… I didn’t have confidence in my experience yet”. He did know, though, that when it happened, he wanted his labels to “have some of those very evocative portraits from those album covers on them.” 

After resigning from Petaluma, he left South Australia to take up the senior winemaker role at Bay of Fires in Tasmania, initially just as a maternity leave cover. Again, that 12-month contract turned into a five-year job. It was a “fantastic experience” for myriad reasons, particularly the relationships he built with the 13 growers he worked with across the state. But in 2015, after Moorilla winemaker Conor van der Reest offered him space to make his own wine at the MONA-based facility, Peter finally decided to jump out of the corporate frying pan. Using fruit sourced from Joe Holyman at Stoney Rise plus two other growers he’d worked with while at Bay of Fires – Meadowbank, and a vineyard now owned by Handpicked – he made the first 200 cases of Dr Edge Pinot Noir. 

He continued to make Dr Edge out of Moorilla Estate until 2018 (from 2016, he also made Meadowbank wines there too, where he was now both winemaker and partner), when the winery’s acquisition of Domaine A meant there was no longer room for him or the other young winemakers Conor had also given a start to, including Nick Glatezer and Samantha Connew. After a couple of itinerant vintages, making Dr Edge and Meadowbank at Stoney Rise, Bay of Fires and Tasmanian Vintners as well as in Oregon, USA, Peter set up his own custom crush facility in Cambridge in 2021 with James Broinowski from Small Island called Dr Island. (At the time of print, the facility was still in operation with 15 clients, although a massive rent increase scheduled for February 2026 casts doubt over its future.) 

Peter calls himself a “first-generation winemaker” and he’s tried to fit in as many harvests as possible over the last two decades (he hit 33 in 2025) to compensate. As well as Petaluma, Bay of Fires, Meadowbank and Dr Edge, he’s involved in Brian Wines, an experimental label conceived with Joe Holyman and Mike Bennie. He's tried to give back, too. He created Dr Island to give small Tasmanian businesses and growers the same start he got at Moorilla, which also keeps Dr Edge wines accessible and affordable. He donates 100 per cent of proceeds from the sale of 300 magnums per year to various charities, principally Hobart City Mission and Doctors Without Borders (he says he’d love to run Dr Edge as a not-for-profit one day). He also famously dressed in drag (“I shaved EVERYWHERE!”) when he was a finalist for Gourmet Traveller WINE’s Winemaker of the Year to protest the male-dominated lineup of nominees (see below picture).

Peter dressed in drag. Photo credit: Jesse Hunniford.

Everybody in the wine industry has a ‘Dredgey story’ (even Martin Shaw and Michael Hill-Smith AM MW, who bought Tolpuddle two weeks after Peter showed them wines from the vineyard), but it’s Dr Edge where his own story is best told. At the 10-year retrospective tasting he hosted at MONA in September, he opened 48 Dr Edge wines from between 2015 and 2024, and each told a personal tale as much as a Tasmanian one. And while the brand, in a way, is a reminder of what he lost – his labels do feature artwork by Robert del Naja, by the way; Peter sends him a case of wine every year as thanks – it’s mostly a symbol of what he gained: “Family and friends and places and times,” he says. “It’s what wine does for everyone.”

This article first appeared in issue #81 of Halliday magazine. Become a member to receive all four issues delivered to your door per year, plus digital access to over 185,000 tasting notes from 4000+ wineries and distilleries, and much more.