Winemakers John and Sarae Adamapoulos have come a long way from selling bottles of wine out of the family Toyota Prado. Just five years ago, the idea of launching a winery in South Australia to compete against some of the country’s best would have been ludicrous.
Now, the husband and wife duo are making some of the best South Australian wine and building a reputation for themselves overseas.
Their ShowBlock Estate in Currency Creek has been awarded as one of the Top Ten Best New Wineries in the 2014 Australian Wine Companion.
The family owned and operated business specialises in cabernet sauvignon, shiraz and merlot varieties and is expected to grow their pallet.
Remarkably, buying the vineyard in 2008 at the height of the GFC actually proved to be a great investment.
“We ended up modelling our first product much sooner than anticipated, you could credit the GFC for that, grape prices had really dropped,” Sarae Adamapoulos tells Neos Kosmos.
“Sometimes you don’t know where you get your blessings from.”
From those humble beginnings, ShowBlock Estate wines have been the Australian wine world’s best kept secret.
Wine critic James Halliday described ShowBlock as “high quality wines at yesterday’s prices”.
As a philosophy, Sarae and John believe in the ‘hands off’ approach to grape growing and wine making, all with minimal intervention.
“Our wine production is so clean, we don’t mess about, we’re not adding or tweaking,” Sarae says.
“A lot of the time our feedback is ‘I didn’t get a headache drinking your wine’,” she says with a laugh.
As a Greek Australian duo, the couple is finding traction in the overseas market. They were one of 12 Australian and New Zealand wineries invited to the VinItaly Expo, a convention filled with the best wine makers around the world showcasing their newest and greatest creations.
While visiting, they were taken under the wing of famous Greek wine maker George Skouras and were invited to work alongside him in the 2014 season.
With that helping hand, John and Sarae want to eventually launch the first Greek Australian collaborative wine.
“Because we are very connected to Greece, we’d love to actually produce a Greek Australian wine and blend the two,” Sarae says. “It’ll be really symbolic.”
And if it’s true what they say, ‘wine gets better over time’, the duo has much to look forward to.
Visit www.showblock.com.au/ for information and stockists.