Tim Smith
Videos
Little Peacock with Gordon Little
Meet Gordon Little, Owner and Co-Founder of Little Peacock Imports! Based in New York, Little Peacock Imports is proud to bring quality, exciting Australian Wines to the U.S. Market.
Meet Gordon Little, Owner and Co-Founder of Little Peacock Imports! Based in New York, Little Peacock Imports is proud to bring quality, exciting Australian Wines to the U.S. Market.... Meet Gordon Little, Owner and Co-Founder of Little Peacock Imports! Based in New York, Little Peacock Imports is proud to bring quality, exciting Australian Wines to the U.S. Market.
Little Peacock with Gordon Little
Born in a ‘light bulb moment’ on a study tour to France’s Rhone Valley, Tim Smith Wines was established in 2001 with our first vintage in 2002.
We are still unashamedly heavily influenced by the wines of the Rhone Valley, but with a very healthy respect for our regional Barossa wine style. We see no point in trying to reinvent the wheel when the wine styles and regionality we enjoy in the Barossa has been around for nearly 180 years; the region must be doing something right. However-the wine geek in me cant help tinkering and responding to our different yearly vintage challenges.
Just as importantly-we want to try and demystify a lot of the elitism about wine: it’s a social lubricant after all; it should be fun...
Philosophy
All Tim Smith wines are made with small select parcels of high quality fruit and are made in small batches of 250-700 cases. The mantra for the brand is that if it does not bear the Tim Smith ‘Thumbprint’ then it is does not meet the quality standard.
Biography
Tim Smith is a Barossa Valley-based winemaker and one of Australia’s most awarded boutique producers. He focuses on making wines from the Barossa region’s time proven varietals of Mourvedre (locally called Mataro), Grenache and Shiraz, and also sources exceptional parcels of Shiraz, Riesling and Viognier fruit from Eden Valley.
Tim’s story started, like many, with a bottle of wine and a dream. The early 1980’s Yarra Yering Dry Red #2, with its heady perfume and rich fruity sweetness, seduced him and he decided he simply had to make his own. His first wine industry role was as a cellar hand at Yalumba in 1987. Fifteen years later, with considerable support from the Yalumba team, he became Winemaker with a wine science degree under his belt and won the Winemaker Exchange Scholarship as part of the Barossa Valley/Rhone Valley Winemaker Exchange Program. He spent a watershed vintage period in the North and South Rhone Valleys, where he was able to shadow a few of the region’s most dynamic winemakers including Thierry Boudinaud and Alberic Mazoyer. This gave him the inspiration to form his own wine company to make the wines he truly enjoys drinking, and on a sunny afternoon drinking Condrieu at the foot of the famous Chapel in Tain L’Hermitage, he promptly repaid his then employers’ generosity by resigning. Returning to Australia he formed Tim Smith Wines, producing the first vintage in 2002.
Tim Smith is a Barossa Valley-based winemaker and one of Australia’s most awarded boutique producers. He focuses on making wines from the Barossa region’s time proven varietals of Mourvedre (locally called Mataro), Grenache and Shiraz, and also sources exceptional parcels of Shiraz, Riesling and Viognier fruit from Eden Valley.
He chose God’s-Own-Barossa as his home, on account of its dream combination of the right region and the right varieties. Within this region, old vine Mataro, Grenache, Shiraz and Riesling are found in small pockets, and Tim turns these ‘gardens’ into something special. A combination of age old varieties and clones, plus the myriad of soil structures and elevations within this famous region, makes it a winemakers’ playground.
Wines from Tim Smith
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