Description
ABOUT VS&B
Vignerons Schmölzer & Brown is the wine and life partnership of Tessa Brown, winemaker and viticulturist & Jeremy Schmölzer, Architect. We planted our vineyard, Thorley, in the highest altitude part of the Beechworth GI in 2014 and 2015. We both work in the vineyard and winery to grow vines and make wines with precision, balance and drinkability. We’re working at reducing synthetic inputs in the vineyard and winemaking process, also.
We make a range of wines from Beechworth, the King Valley, and occasionally the Alpine Valleys as we’ve been waiting for our own property to reach maturity. The Thorley wines are solely from our farm. The Brunnen vineyard is a tiny parcel of vines across the road from us owned by our neighbours, which we’ve been working with since 2014. The Obstgarten wines are from a high altitude Riesling vineyard in Whitlands, King Valley. Our Prêt-à-Blanc, Prêt-à-Rosé and Prêt-à-Rouge wines are all blends, assembled with an eye to easy drinking.
Every one of our wines is made with hand-picked fruit. The wines ferment with only indigenous yeast (the waxy stuff on the outside of the grape) and if the wines go through Malolacatic fermentation, then that is spontaneous. Where possible, we’d like the only addition made to our wines to be preserving sulphur dioxide. Once our own vineyard is old enough to be mechanically cultivated, we will undertake conversion to organic viticulture there.
We spend a lot more time in the field than in the cellar, so our winemaking practises are pretty simple. We don’t fine, and only filter our white wines
