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Two Hands
Barossa Valley, Australia3 wines3.7 avg
Barossa Shiraz house founded in 1999 by Michael Twelftree and Richard Mintz: grower fruit from South Australia and Victoria plus its own Marananga vineyards, sorted by barrel grade into the Flagship, Single Vineyard, Garden and Picture series.
Two Hands started at an engagement party. In September 1999 Michael Twelftree, who had come to wine from construction and a small export business, and Richard Mintz, who ran one of Australia.s leading cooperages, decided to make their own wine. The first vintage, 2000, was about 17 tonnes of bought fruit, and the aim they set then is still the one on the producer's site: the best possible Shiraz-based wines from prized growing regions across Australia.
The early wines were built on growers' fruit, and a Barossa base came gradually: the Coach House vineyard at Greenock from 2002, a cellar door at Marananga in 2003 and a winery there by the end of 2004, built for small batches so that every parcel could be handled separately, then the Holy Grail site on Seppeltsfield Road, dated 2007 in the producer's current history and later in its older one, and planted out from 2015, the last block, The Clos, in 2017. The strategy, borrowed from a Rhone producer, is not to own every vineyard but to own the best. Fruit from McLaren Vale, Clare Valley, Eden Valley, Adelaide Hills and Heathcote still comes from growers.
The range is sorted by grading barrels. Six months after vintage each barrel gets a grade from A+ down to D. A handful of A+ barrels make the Flagship wines, every other grade ties a barrel to its place in the range, and anything graded C or below is dropped. The Garden Series is six single-region Shirazes handled identically in the cellar and named after the founders' family members, so the region is what sets them apart. The Picture Series carries Polaroid-style photographs by Don Brice and names Twelftree comes up with: Gnarly Dudes, Sexy Beast, Angels' Share.
The winemaking passed from founding winemaker Matt Wenk to Ben Perkins and, in July 2019, to Richard Langford. The ownership moved on too: US investor Tim Hower came in alongside Twelftree in 2015, and today Two Hands belongs to Twelftree and Pierre-Henri Morel, who joined from Chapoutier in 2014 and became co-proprietor in 2022.
