The opening this week of a new 500-tonne winery in the Barossa marks a big change in how RedHeads is preparing and exporting its small batch Australian wines to a thirsty global audience.

RedHeads, the Australian arm of London-based Direct Wines Production (which trades as Laithwaite’s Wine), emerged in a very different guise in 2002.

It initially served as a communal local production site for South Australian-based “flying winemakers” who had spent vintages working at the Laithwaite family’s facilities in Bordeaux, France.

Renting production spaces in McLaren Vale, then in the Barossa, the RedHeads Collective produced a diverse suite of interesting small-batch wines for Direct Wines Production to sell to its burgeoning lists of international customers.

Now, 17 years later, Direct Wines Production is the world’s largest direct-to-consumer wine business, handing a portfolio of more than 1500 wines, and within this big range it sells about 25,000 dozen RedHeads wines into the UK, US, Canadian and Australian markets.

To keep apace with growing demand, the company decided to invest more heavily in its Australian wine production, and purchased an 8ha shiraz vineyard near Angaston in January 2018.

It then commissioned Barossa construction company Ahrens Engineering to swiftly erect large winery sheds in time for vintage 2019, acknowledging that this investment gained SA Government support.

Winemaker and site manager Alex Trescowthick is set to crush the first chardonnay grapes at the new RedHeads Winery on Wednesday (February 20) as the opening salvo of an expected 350-tonne vintage – well within the limits of the 500-tonne winery’s capacity.

“Quite simply, we needed more wine. We have customers calling out for it, so we needed to be able to dramatically scale up our production,” says Direct Wines general manager for production Iain Muggoch, who was in Australia for the launch of the new facility, but is based at the company’s London headquarters.

“Choosing the Barossa as our location is all about us wanting to obtain increased access to Barossa fruit.”

It has been a big transition from fostering small-scale winemaking experimentation to nurturing global reach, and the RedHeads focus began to change direction in 2014.

The original winemakers who formed the RedHeads Collective had left the fold to start their own wine brands – Justin Lane (Freddy Nerks Wines), Phil Christianson (Longwood Wines) and Adam Hooper (La Curio) being the most highly recognised – and RedHeads became a singular winemaking team that worked with individual parcels of fruit from a wide network of independent grape growers.

“For us, RedHeads was a movement – an idea that encompassed what Direct Wines wanted to achieve by selling small batch Australian wines to a global market,” says Iain.

“By taking out the middle man, we gave our customers all over the world easy access to exciting Australian wines that otherwise would only have remained in Australia.

“Of course there have been a couple of RedHead studio wineries over the years, in McLaren Vale (initially at Foggo Road, then at Chalk Hill Road) and in the Barossa (at Lyndoch, Light Pass and Tanunda), but the guiding principles remain the same.

“Initially, we provided assistance to winemakers working under corporate banners to produce their own interesting small batch wines. We’re still making limited batches, but now we’re working with a larger league of grape growers, giving them good contract options beyond what some of the giant corporations are offering.”

This results in a dizzy maze of brands produced under the RedHeads banner and sold by Direct Wines Production – up to 35 different labels, with 16 Studio wines, four in the Icon range, two “Nightmare” blends and a dozen Winemaker releases.

The majority of these have a production ceiling of between 1000 to 2000 dozen bottles (although some are as limited as 250 dozen), while about 5000 dozen bottles are produced of RedHeads’ most popular wine Coco Rotie (a playful pun on the French Rhone region that is home this style of shiraz/viognier blend, with a grinning chimp on the label).

“To achieve all this, we couldn’t still be squatting in other people’s sheds from year to year. We needed our own home base,” says Iain.

The new facility has been designed to allow further growth. The barrel hall can accommodate about 1000 tonnes of wine in barrel, a vast network of solar panels supplies the site’s own licensed 2mW power station, and the infrastructure footprint can be easily expanded to double the current processing to 1000 tonnes, when demand necessitates it.

The RedHeads Barossa site will undergo further transformation when it opens a cellar door tasting venue from November 1, but Iain warns that it will be different to standard wine tasting rooms.

“Nothing we do is ever going to be the same old thing,” he says, noting that private tastings can now be made by appointment.

“The modern winery visit has to provide an outstanding, engaging, truly memorable experience – and that’s what we’re in the process of creating.”

Top image: Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment David Ridgway, left, officially opens RedHeads alongside Tom Laithwaite.

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