Ruggabellus

Abel Gibson arrived in the Barossa Valley as a 2yo in 1975, his father on the way to becoming senior viticulturist for Penfolds, and absorbed the 150yo history of the Valley. It was almost inevitable that between 1990 and ’92, Abel, then in his late teens, would flirt with university studies (including wine science at Roseworthy) then decided he wanted nothing more to do with it. Between ’93 and 2000 he spent winters skiing and snowboarding, riding thousands of kilometres on a bicycle around NZ and Tasmania, then 20 000km around Australia in a ’74 VW Kombi, and travelling through Central America, discovering its 3000+yo civilisations, all of this funded by seasonal employment. Simply because it was easy, when he returned home in ’01 he took a vintage job at Penfolds, which did nothing to light his fire. In ’02 he was offered a position at Rockford, and at the age of 27 he finally found what he had been looking for. An ’03 vintage in Spain at Campo de Borja was followed by the ’04 vintage with Charles Melton, before he finally joined his father’s winery over the next 3 years. The next decisive step was a three-year stint at Spinifex, cementing all of the pieces of his prior experience into a coherent whole, and laying the ground for his small-batch winemaking, linked to specific plots of old vines. Exports to the UK, US and Japan. -JAMES HALLIDAY