14th May 2020 | Cork Talk | 6 minute read
A pioneering wine project that’s been two years in the making, Black Flag is the joint venture of a legendary Aussie winemaker and our very own Head Wine Buyer. With the first bottles in the range debuting on our site last year, some of you may already be familiar with the Black Flag name – but few will know the story of how this creative collaboration came to be.
It all starts with a man called Steve Grimley. Based in one of South Australia’s hippest regions, McLaren Vale, Steve has been making outstanding wines his whole working life. Known by many of our customers as the guy behind the adventurous 5OS range, Steve is very much our main wine guy Down Under.
Years of working in vineyards and seeing how other people made wine fuelled Steve’s inquisitive nature, and ignited an ambition to produce his own top-notch wines. Like so many of us at VW, Steve lives and breathes wine, which is why we love working with him so much!
Enter the second half of our dynamic duo – our Head Wine Buyer, Andrew Baker. After asking Steve to help out with the Australian wine buying back in the early days of VW, Andrew and Steve struck up a friendship.
Finding that they both shared a similar outlook on wine, the pair decided to have a go at creating their own wines a few years back, one of which was named Black Pig… (It’s fair to say this went on to do pretty well!). With Andrew’s vast experience and wine buying knowledge, coupled with Steve’s innovative approach to winemaking, it’s turned into an ongoing partnership with a winning formula!
While Steve has continued to work on his own projects in Aus, including 5OS, he and Andrew remained keen to attempt another exciting collaboration when the time was right.
Steve’s 5OS wines proved to be a huge hit both in Australia and with our customers here in the UK. Demand was growing to a point where the 5OS approach of producing small boutique and one-off batches of unique blends no longer felt like a natural fit for the volume required.
Refusing to wave the white flag, Steve and Andrew caught up over a glass of wine and decided that now was the time to work on that new project together – a project that was aptly named Black Flag. But this time, is was to be different to anything we’ve done before.
Nothing was to be off the table. Any grape variety, or blend, would be considered. Likewise any scale of production, be it 1,000 cases or 100. The only proviso was that these wines had to be crafted without any constraints or compromise.
Bold, flavoursome wines packaged in striking bottles is Steve’s trademark. Together, he and Andrew have put together a daring and dynamic range of beautiful blends that really showcase the talent on offer in McLaren Vale. Black Flag has been built by an eclectic team of like-minded wine enthusiasts and creatives to help put the wines in this range together – and they are involved in everything from crushing the grapes to designing the label artwork and hosting wine tastings in Steve’s wine shop up in the Adelaide Hills.
These are wines which will likely only ever be produced once, and once they’ve gone, they really have gone. This is winemaking without limits. Wines that are meant to be enjoyed in the moment, you might say. And here at Virgin Wines is the only place where you’ll be able to try them.
When we’re not all in lockdown, Steve regularly visits the UK and loves to come to our Live Wine Tasting events to chat to people about his latest wines, much like he does in his Adelaide shop. We also have some exclusive Black Flag tasting events in the pipeline for those who are keen to get their hands on new releases before they go on our site.
Sign up to our quarterly Black Flag newsletter to be the first to hear about these events, and to receive special offers from the Black Flag team! Simply click blackflag@virginwines.co.uk and press send on the email, and we’ll add you to the mailing list.
