We Didn't Plan This. We Just Couldn't Stop.
Unruly Wines was not part of the plan.
We come from the corporate world — careers, city, and the kind of life that looks fine from the outside but leaves you quietly wondering if there is something more. The answer, it turned out, was 63 acres of neglected vines in Broke Fordwich and a dream we could not talk ourselves out of.
We found the property after years of searching. It did not tick all the boxes. The vines had been abandoned — overgrown, unruly, and forgotten. Most people would have walked away. We saw something else. We saw potential in the soil, majesty in the mountains surrounding the land, and the beginning of something we could not yet name.
We bought it anyway.
What followed was ten years of learning, losing, and refusing to give up. Drought that lasted four years and tested the water supply to its limits. Bushfires in 2020 that blanketed Broke Fordwich in smoke for over a month and wiped out an entire harvest. Floods in 2022 that swallowed the vineyard whole — vines submerged, fences gone, three months of clean-up before a single vine could be tended again. A late frost in 2025 that took the Chardonnay. Hail in 2026 that took the Chambourcin.
Every single time, we started again.
The original plan was simple — grow grapes and sell them. And for the first couple of years, that is exactly what we did. But then something unexpected happened. People started telling us how extraordinary the Chardonnay was. Word spread. There were even stories of people jumping fences at harvest time just to get those grapes.
In 2021, we made our first wine under the Unruly label — a wild ferment Chardonnay that stopped everyone who tasted it. That bottle changed everything. The grape sellers became winemakers. The plan became a passion. The passion became Unruly Wines.
Today, Unruly Wines is a single-vineyard, small-batch producer making wines that taste exactly like where they come from — a specific piece of land in one of Australia's most extraordinary yet overlooked wine regions. Every bottle tells a decade of stories. Every vintage is a new chapter.
This is what happens when passion ignites. Welcome to Unruly.
