Story
Lost Farm Wines – Tasmania.
A winemaking project 44 years in the making.
I was very lucky to have grown up in a winemaking family. Since 1886, five generations of my family have worked in winemaking and grape growing. In 2008 I worked harvest in the beautiful Tamar Valley in northern Tasmania. I just loved the landscape, vineyards and flavours of the wines. Many years later when the opportunity arose to work with a number of small growers to create a range of small batch wines, I could not resist the opportunity, and so Lost Farm Wines was born.
Lost Farm Wines is about discovery and potential. Working with a small group of talented grape growers, exceptional vineyard sites and trying to realise the potential in the wines we make from them.
Cheers,
Richard Angove.
1974
Five years before I was born, in 1974, the South Australian Land Commission compulsorily acquired our family farm, planted to our best vines, in the small township of Tea Tree Gully, near Adelaide, South Australia.
Our family’s best viticultural asset, the Tregrehan Vineyard, which at the time, was referred to by locals simply as “The Farm” was lost as government bureaucrats re-zoned the land from agricultural to residential.
My grandfather, Tom, fought the ruling all the way to South Australia’s Supreme Court with no success. With the stroke of a pen, our family farm was lost.
2008
Thirty four years later, in the Tamar Valley in Northern Tasmania, I worked my last vintage before joining the family wine business. The role was as a night shift assistant winemaker, hard work, but it meant that I saw the sunrise each and every morning. Those beautiful Tasmanian vineyards and wines stuck in my mind.
2018
Ten years later, after a fortuitous phone call from a Tasmanian winemaking legend, an opportunity arose to partner with a number of small growers in the Tamar Valley. Amazingly one of whose vineyard was located directly across the road from the house I lived in for six months, back in 2008.
To bring some of our old family history to this new winemaking project and to remember our best farm, lost to urban sprawl in 1974, Lost Farm – Tasmania was born.
