Marius Wines
Producer Website
Practices & Techniques
Hand-pruned, hand picked, hand-weeded. No machinery, no heavy tractors. No pesticides, no herbicides, no systemic fungicides. It makes a difference.
Three passes through the vineyard in the weeks before harvest dropping any bunches that may not be perfect. It makes a difference.
The philosophy at Marius is to grow flavour and produce powerful wines. This is achieved by all our vineyard practices combining to produce low yields of small bunches of flavoursome small berries with a high skin to juice ratio.
All fruit is hand -picked and this is done sequentially over approximately ten to twenty days to ensure that all the grapes are as near as possible to ‘perfect’ when picked. Mid-rows are not cultivated or tilled, the natural grasses are slashed, no pesticides are used and our worm population is growing rapidly. Our spray programme is only sulphur at high-risk periods for powdery mildew as we are blessed with good air circulation through the vineyard.
Approximately thirty five per cent of the vineyard has been ‘throttled back’ progressively over the past five years and is now dry-grown. Minimal irrigation is practiced in the remainder of the vineyard.
Most importantly we are blessed with a unique geology. At some indeterminate time in the ancient past a cataclysmic event enveloped the Marius vineyard in a talus of Kurrajong type rocks and gravels to a depth of many metres. These rocks and gravels are unique in that they are from different geological periods, all mixed up together by some freak event. Our vines feed on this wonderful, complex mix of minerals and elements.
Estate Vineyards
The Marius vineyard is situated on rising ground to the south-east of McLaren Vale township at an elevation of 170 metres above sea-level. It is ideally positioned to take advantage of both the maritime climatic influence and the cooling gully breezes on summer evenings. The vineyard is small, being only four and a half acres of Shiraz.