Description
About Stoke Wines
The Stoke brand is a tribute to the largely untapped potential of Kangaroo Island as a premium wine-growing region. Nick Dugmore makes wines that are expressive of the relatively cool, wind-swept vineyards of KI, with a focus on lighter to midweight styles with food and conviviality in mind. The leased Cassini Vineyard now provides the bulk of the fruit for the label, with Dugmore farming the site regeneratively side by side with his father.
“We promote wine first, then our region, and then what we do personally,” says Dugmore. “We aim to make wines that reflect their place, always minimal intervention after a huge focus on quality in the vineyard. They range from drink now to wines with structure and longevity. Always consistent, reliable and made with a lot of care and attention.”
Dugmore is a South Australian native, whose “love affair with Kangaroo Island began on a surf trip around Australia in a banana-yellow Ford Falcon in 2008”. That trip never made it past KI, and wine marketing and vintage work there followed.
He believes deeply in the island’s immense untapped potential to produce premium fruit, and to make extraordinary wine. Its low humidity and drying sea breezes make it a simpler proposition to grow organically, and most vineyards are dry grown. It benefits from the moderating maritime influence that McLaren Vale gets, but it is much cooler and tends to ripen fruit more in line with the Adelaide Hills, allowing time to build flavour over a long ripening period.
