Marius Vineyard                                                         

Marius vineyard, looking across the McLaren Vale / Willunga  basin and out to the Gulf of St. Vincent.

McLaren Vale is blessed with a mild temperate climate and complex ironstone soils.

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.  

The soils range from clay through ironstone and limestone to alluvial gravels. 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 three weeks 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 and weeds are slashed, no pesticides are used and our worm population is growing rapidly.   Our spray programme is only low-level fungicides at high-risk periods for powdery and downy 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 three years and is now dry-grown.  Minimal irrigation is practiced in the remainder of the vineyard.