GALAFREY WINES

Our winemaking philosophy is simply…

YOU NEED GOOD GRAPES TO MAKE GOOD WINE!

It makes sense. Imagine you got awful, mouldy grapes in at the winery. It will make dirty, mouldy tasting wines. If you have good clean fruit come in at the winery you have good clean wine. Of course you also need to add picking the grapes at the right time so that the acidity and fruit sweetness is balanced.

Here at Galafrey we have a great Dry grown Vineyard. Our grapes our small but intense with flavour because we don’t irrigate. The Juice of the berry has better contact with the skin and seeds with add things like deep colour and rich tannins. Because of our Dry grown vineyard canopy management is easier making our fruit less susceptible to disease. Our 34 Year’s experience with this vineyard we know our vineyard well and monitor the fruit during the ripening season making sure we pick at the right time. When the fruit comes in at the winery we are really putting our best foot forward and it’s is now up to the winery to maintain this high quality fruit flavour throughout the winemaking process.

Relocated to a purpose-built but utilitarian winery after previously inhabiting the exotic surrounds of the old Albany wool store, Galafrey makes wines with plenty of robust, if not rustic, character, drawing grapes in the main from estate plantings. Following the death of husband/father/founder Ian Tyrer, Kim and Linda Tyrer have taken up the reins, announcing, ‘There is girl power happening at Galafrey Wines!' There is a cornucopia of back vintages available, some superb and underpriced, at the cellar door. James Halliday

" Galafrey Wines is a family owned boutique winery creating great wines from their dry grown vineyard. Established in 1977 by one of the pioneers of the wine industry, the late Ian Tyrer,is still in good hands with wife Linda and daughter Kim keeping up the tradition" Ray Jordan.

Vintage, in wine-making, is the process of picking grapes and creating the finished product. A vintage wine is one made from grapes that were all, or primarily, grown and harvested in a single specified year.

In wine produced on the colder limits of wine production, vintage is often very important, because some seasons will be much warmer and produce riper grapes and better wine for people to drink. On the other hand, a poor growing season can lead to grapes low in sugar, which lowers the quality of the resulting wine.

Wines of superior vintages from prestigious producers and regions will often command much higher prices than those from average vintages. This is especially the case if wines are likely to improve further with some age in the bottle.Some wines are only labeled with a vintage in better-than-average years, to maintain their quality and reputation, while the vast majority of wines are produced to be drunk young and fresh.

The history of wine  spans thousands of years and is closely intertwined with the history of agriculture, cuisine, civilisation and humanity itself. Archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest wine production came from sites in Georgia and Iran, dating from 6000 to 5000 BC.

In medieval Europe, following the decline of Rome and therefore of widespread wine production, the Christian Church was a staunch supporter of the wine necessary for celebration of the Catholic Mass. Whereas wine was also forbidden in medieval Islamic cultures, Gerber and other Muslim chemists pioneered the distillation of wine for medicinal  purposes and its use in Christian  libation was widely tolerated. Wine production gradually increased and its consumption became popularised from the 15th century onwards, surviving the devastating Phylloxera louse of the 1870s and eventually establishing growing regions throughout the world. 

Wine was common in classical Greece and Rome and many of the major wine producing regions of Western Europe today were established with Phoenician and later Roman plantations. Wine making technology, such as the wine press, improved considerably during the time of the Roman Empire; many grape varieties and cultivation techniques were known and barrels were developed for storing and shipping wine. 

The archaeological evidence becomes clearer and points to domestication of grapevine in Early Bronze age sites of the Near East , Sumer and Egypt from around the third millennium BC. Evidence of the earliest European wine production has been uncovered at archaeological sites in Macedonia, dated to 6,500 years ago. These same sites also contain remnants of the world’s earliest evidence of crushed grapes. In Egypt, wine became a part of recorded history, playing an important role in ancient ceremonial life. Traces of wild wine dating from the second and first millennium BC have also been found in China.