Malcolm Logan began planting vines in Orange in 1994 and was then, one of the only five wineries in the area. Today, there are about 50 wineries in Orange, which is about ten times more than twenty odd years ago. Located on the North and West slopes of the Great Dividing Range, Orange is the highest wine region in Australia. Its altitude, cool weather and rich volcanic soils are the perfect ingredients to produce delicate wines with elegance and depth.
The Orange terroir experiences cool nights and mornings due to the high altitude vineyards situated at 600 – 1000m (some 250km West of Sydney) and sunny and dry days due to the desert region in the inland, West of Orange. The volcanic soil is also relatively rich and contains reddish clay with quartz stone and gravel.
Mudgee (Aboriginal for ‘Nest in the Hills’) is one of Australia’s oldest wine regions and the birthplace of Australian chardonnay. Slightly lower in altitude than Orange, temperatures in Mudgee are not as cold but gravelly ironstone and quartz laced red loam soils are ideal to create wines of great depth and character.
Peter Logan is the second-generation winemaker at Logans Wines. He started out with a mindset of “The same old thing. There’s plenty of that. Why make more?” When he first started out, he wanted to make wines that he liked to drink and not cater to a demographic. Against lots of strong opinions, he began deviating from the usual winemaker script, different from what was taught and what the establishments were doing.
He chose the then unfamiliar NSW Central Ranges as the base and planted Tempranillo, made Pinot Gris when few did, made Gewürztraminer (which people still don’t), created whimsical labels and stories, fermented white grapes on their skins, used large barrel oak, wild yeasts and now, even sell wine in kegs!
