“It was an accident,” says David Hickinbotham, chuckling over the out-of-nowhere success of his Paringa wines.
“ We are just grapegrowers. We never had any intention of making wine.”

Some grapegrowers! The Hickinbotham family’s 200 acres in Clarendon Hills produce the raw material for luxury-class wines, including some of Roman Bratasiuk’s cult-status Clarendon Hills Shiraz and Grenache.
Hickinbothams also operate a vineyard at Renmark, planted in 1997 at the request of wine giant, Southcorp, which needed grapes to bolster its low-end wines.
It covers 900 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Merlot, Colomabard and Chardonnay. But by 1999 a planting boom had left Southcorp with too many growers. “They had to take what we produced under contract, but they wanted to limit us to 5,000 tonnes (off the 500 acres then in production).”

Late in 1998, Hickinbotham met US importer, Dan Philips of The Grateful Palate which specialises in small production, high-ended wines. Neither Hickinbotham nor Philips remembers how the idea of value-orientated wine came up, but Philips wrote Hickinbotham a letter in January 1999 in which he describes what the proposed wine should be like, using words such as “rich”, “ripe” and “creamy”. The resultant wine rated 88 points for its richness and polish, exactly the qualities Philips described in his letter. The 2001 is even better, rating 90 points for its greater intensity. Few wines anywhere can match its kind of big, rich character in its (US$10/bottle) price range.