What the locals are loving: Hither & Yon

South Australia’s sustainable wine grape growing McLaren Vale region redefines what it is to make a ‘good wine’ – and one producer is setting the benchmark.

For brothers Richard and Malcolm Leask, founders of Hither & Yon, making great wine starts from the ground up. “There’s a real energy and tension about our wines that expresses sight, place, but also surrounding biodiversity, that I think is unique,” explains Malcolm, who credits the early adoption of regenerative agricultural principles and their eco-conscious approach to wine making.

“The Hither & Yon story probably started out, as the name suggests, in a bit of a wandering nature, but over the last 10 years we’ve become super sensitive and highly tuned into what we believe our future is and what we can control,” Malcolm says. Producing delicious wines that don’t cost the earth (in a very literal sense) is their top priority – Hither & Yon was the first winery in South Australia to be certified carbon neutral, and all of their farming practices are carried out with the future in mind. “We’ve really understood this is what we do best, in terms of looking after our land for the next generation –all we’re doing is trying to minimise the impact on the beautiful environment that we already have.”

Grape growing has long been a family affair for the brothers Leask, having grown up in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley before relocating to McLaren Vale as children in 1980 when their parents purchased a vineyard of their own. “The regenerative agricultural approach we take today was probably born out of this care for the environment that Mum and Dad had established back then,” Malcolm says.

“The easiest and purest way of describing what we do is what we call grass to glass,” he explains. “The wines are frothing really in terms of their colour and their varietal expression, elements of soil and geology. We truly hope that people can see the vitality and see the healthy nature of what we’re doing, not just in the vineyard but on our land, on our surrounding areas, into the wine.”