Elbourne Wines

Adam and Alexys Elbourne have done what many thousands of young families have dreamt of doing: selling their house in Sydney and moving to the unpolluted environment of the Hunter Valley to bring up their family. Their house sold in two weeks, making the search for property more urgent than most. But you make your own luck, and they had already made many trips to the Hunter, simply to enjoy the wine and food scene - and Alexys was raised on an 80ha property on the banks of the Patterson River. So it seemed inevitable that they would find and buy the 22ha Marrowbone Road property, with 2ha each of rundown chardonnay and shiraz and enough land to have a boutique racehorse stud and a Noah's Ark of animals including rare Wessex Saddleback pigs. The last pieces of the puzzle were the two-year restoration of the vineyard under the direction of one of the great viticulturists of the Hunter Valley, Neil Stevens, who continues to manage the vineyard, and the appointment of Nick Paterson as contract winemaker. -JAMES HALLIDAY