I’m Doug Neal…
My passion for wine started at Uni when Jimmy Watson's was preferred to the pubs round Melbourne University, not being a beer drinker back in the early 80s.
Whilst teaching, I started working part-time at Armadale Cellars in Toorak. It was here I started to sell the first release of Giaconda's wines made by Rick Kinzbrunner.
Rick invited me up to Giaconda in 1988, and I never left, as he mentored me in winemaking, and then asked me to be involved in the business that continues today to import French oak barrels for Australia and New Zealand.
The barrel business has provided me the opportunity to spend extensive time working with winemakers in Bordeaux, Burgundy, The Rhone. South Africa, New Zealand and Australia over the past 27 years.
Apart from making my own wines, I also consult to a small number of wineries regarding oak use, blending and development of their brand in terms of wine style.
Today, I make expressions of Shiraz under the Altera Terra label and Chardonnay with my long time friend and fellow winemaker Darrin Gaffy. These wines are made to reflect what I love about Shiraz and Chardonnay, with an intent to offer complex, elegant and refined wines that show the true structure and energy, complexity of aroma and flavour and personality of the great sites I work with.
Paradise IV Vineyards were planted on 500 million year old eroded granite, with deposits of ironstone that sit above 20 million year old limestone loam. The proximity to the Moorabool River provided cooling breezes that moderated temperatures during the summer and cooled the vineyards, and the Otway’s provided a rain shadow which kept the vineyards relatively free of disease pressure from rain. Unfortunately, these vineyards are no longer in existence and the 2018 wines from Paradise IV are the last expressions to ever have been made from this extraordinary site.
Altera Terra was born after the Paradise IV vineyards were destroyed. It’s translation is “Another Land” and this new label explores exceptional terroirs for shiraz, grown in immaculate vineyards in Murrumbateman (NSW), Pyrenees (VIC) and McLaren Vale (SA). Heavily rock influenced soils are a very important feature within the premium sites Doug chooses to make his wines from. Doug firmly believes that rocky soils are essential for producing expressions of Shiraz with structure, depth, aromatic complexity and intensity of flavour.
Gaffy & Neal is a boutique label that specialises in making elegant, structured and complex terroir-driven Chardonnay from exceptional vineyards within the Mornington Peninsula (VIC). A partnership between Doug Neal and Darrin Gaffy of Principia Wines, this new venture has already produced wines that have set new benchmarks for the region and have solidified their place amongst the finest expressions of Chardonnay in Australia today.