The same hand
from the land.
We planted vines and began to listen
In 2006 there was a label and no land. Even Keel, built on a conviction about cool climates long before there was anywhere to grow them. Eighteen months later there was land at Red Hill.
Polperro followed. Not a second business. A name for wines that could only come from these particular slopes, once we had been here long enough to know what they were saying.
We did not plan a destination. We planted vines and began to listen. The cellar door came. Then the dining room. The farm. The villas. Hut. Many Little. The boutique. Not by design, but by listening, and we built every piece of it ourselves.
Twenty years of listening
You spend enough years watching soil come back to life, watching vine health move from fragile to fierce, and you stop thinking of farming as a practice. It becomes a conversation. A long, slow, honest one.
A vine takes years to say anything useful. It cannot be hurried and it cannot be corrected afterwards. Plant the wrong thing on the wrong slope and you find out in five years, not five weeks. The whole skill is choosing well, then having the patience to leave it alone.
Twenty years in, we are still learning what this land wants. Not a region. These rows. And the answer changes every season.
“It becomes a conversation. A long, slow, honest one.
The buying is no different
A vineyard and a boutique have nothing in common except the only thing that matters. Both begin with someone standing still, paying attention.
In the winery the role is to guide rather than shape. Let each site say what it has to say. Add as little as possible. Take nothing away that should have stayed.
I buy the same way. I am not putting a look on a season. I am listening to people who know their material far better than I ever will, and choosing the ones worth standing behind. Craftsmanship in real hands. Restraint. Quality that needs no explaining. Respect, for the material and for whoever ends up wearing it.
“Both begin with someone standing still, paying attention.
Which is why the list reads the way it does
Florence, 1221. Santa Maria Novella has been distilling ever since, and has changed almost nothing about how. The Charente, 1270. Twenty generations of one family on the same land, first for cognac and later for scent. Paris, 1643. Trudon still has the glass blown by mouth.
Adelaide. Acler is draped by hand before anything is cut. The Sunshine Coast. Zoe Kratzmann learned on her mother's machine and still works with a design team of two, making only what is needed. Above Ubud. Charlotte Blakeney spent two years drawing a single necklace. Melbourne, then Italy and Portugal. Christian Kimber draws here and has it made by family workshops that have done this work for generations.
None of them is the easy commercial choice. Every one of them would rather do it properly than do it faster. Nothing forced and everything earned.
Which costs us something. Menswear here is one house rather than nine. Womenswear arrives in ones and twos. Perfumery is eight independent houses, not thirty. And nothing is bought with a discount already in mind, because a vineyard cannot mark a bad year down into a good one. Neither can we.
A place people did not want to leave
Polperro is the vineyard, the cellar door and the dining room, which has held a Chef's Hat four years running. Not as a destination in itself, but as a reflection of a deeper way of working. The menu comes off the farm just past the vines, where the farmer and the chef plan a year ahead around things not yet in the ground.
The cellar door is cut into the hillside and kept cool by the earth above it. Walls of wine. Low light. A stone table in the middle. Everyone around it, nobody behind it. Ten at a time.
Four villas sit among the rows on Talland Hill, forty metres from the dining room. The Farmhouse is further along on Donaldsons Road, a 1950s house we reworked with Hecker Guthrie, with Western Port across the vines, a pine forest at its back and a path through the rows that walks you quietly home.
Hut we built ten years ago, well before wellness became a word nobody could avoid. Each January it comes down to the lawn for Yoga in the Vines. Many Little is in the village, opened in 2018 and handed over in 2026 to Gayan Pieris, who had run the kitchen from the first day and made it his own.
The boutique sits two minutes from the vines, which means you can make a day of it without having planned one.
“Luxury has never been about more. It is about truer.
Named for two girls
Care, when it runs deep enough, becomes a place you can feel. It is the temperature of a barrel room. The gap between vine rows where the cover crops grow wild. A box tied by hand at the counter before it goes, whatever is inside it and whatever it cost.
Amelie and Frankie are our daughters. The boutique carries their names, which is either sentimental or the most accurate thing about it, depending on how you look at a family business.
A belief in craft. A respect for the land. A commitment to building something that will last well beyond us.