Konpira Maru
Minimal intervention, maximum care, is the motto of the Konpira Maru Wine Company, established in 2013 by Alastair Reed and Sam Cook. Some of our Tufnell Park customers will remember Sam at the north London store back in the day, with his bone dry wit and love of Kernel IPA. Alastair comes from a scientific and academic background, and it was while leading the viticulture and winemaking course at the Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (now Melbourne Polytechnic) that he met Sam, who had returned to winemaking after coming back from London.
It is quite common in Australia, and California for that matter, not to own vineyards but to buy grapes from trusted growers. Since their inaugural release of just 600 bottles in 2014 they have been sourcing grapes from South Burnett and the Granite Belt in Queensland and from Kilmore in Victoria. In 2016 they purchased their very own piece of dirt (to use Aussie parlance) and include grapes from their Whitlands vineyard high above King Valley in the mix.
Victoria, and the sub-region of King Valley, are more likely to be familiar to wine lovers than Queensland, better known as the Sunshine State. In fact its location close to the tropics make it mostly too humid to grow grapes, except at higher elevations in the so called Granite Belt. It is an unpredicatable and at times heartbreaking place to grow grapes.
Now with a production of 3,500 cases per year Konpira Maru are constantly experimenting, working with a diverse palette of grapes from saperavi to sagrantino, to make wines that are as drinkable as they are irreverent. Even without drought these are micro-production wines and are in high demand in Australia. Just in time for summer they are landing with us, and are the perfect pick me up after a long and socially distant year.
