Basket Range, Adelaide Hills
Basket Range, Adelaide Hills
The Broderick Family
Basket Range is a pioneering project under the direction of the young Australian winemaking virtuoso Sholto Broderick, a second-generation grower and producer in the central Adelaide hills. His father Phillip had developed the original vineyards of their family estates in the 1980s, planted to the Bordeaux varieties of Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. In the year 2000, their estate expanded with the purchase of further holdings planted to Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Saperavi. Before taking over viticulture at the estate in 2016, Sholto cut his teeth in France and other wineries in the Adelaide hills, now vinifying a range of wines from their own holdings, as well as a small quantity of grapes from local growers to help meet the rapidly spiking demand his wines are subject to.
From Sholto Broderick at Basket Range Wines:
The Bantam is a dynamic wine that showcases juicy soft plums, white pepper, and graphitic tannin, with a savoury, highly drinkable quality. Designed for earlier drinking, it’s best served cooler, at about 12c.
Terroir
The vineyard holdings of Basket Range comprise three distinctive blocks on one south-facing and two north-facing slopes. These are ancient soils, sat on sandstone bedrock with a topsoil of red and blue clays interspersed with broken pebbles of ironstone and quartzite. Later ripening Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petit Verdot sit on their northern slopes, with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay sat on their cooler and more protected south facing terroir. Sholto’s goal is to make precise and detailed terroir wines, prizing elegance, energy and perfumed aromatics over raw power, and these bottles are beginning to turn heads. His Estate Cabernet, a Bordeaux blend with the inclusion of Merlot and Petit Verdot, is up there with the best in Australia, the 2021 vintage awarded the ‘Best Cabernet Trophy’ at the Adelaide Hills Wine Show in 2022. This wine has a pleasing, slightly cool herbaceousness, with notes of green tobacco leaf and vibrant redcurrant fruit alongside more classic flavours of ripe plum and blackcurrants. The Petit Verdot in the blend helps to add complexity, leaving hallmark aromas of graphite and flowers on both nose and palate.
Sholto Broderick, Rising Star
In addition to his impeccable cool-climate expressions of Pinot and Chardonnay, Sholto also makes an innovative blend called Bantam, which melds whole bunch macerated Merlot and Petit Verdot with small quantities of Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. Lifted, strawberry-scented and spicy courtesy of stem inclusion, this was recently lauded by Matthew Jukes as one of his 100 Wines of Australia for 2025, praising it as ‘a wickedly enticing glugger with crunchy, clean, weightless fruit and lashings of élan.’ Gently chill and get drinking in the summer sun!
Although Sholto’s career is only just beginning, this is already accomplished, forward looking and exciting winemaking of the highest order. An excellent opportunity to try the wines of a future star of Australian wine before his bottles gain cult status.
Their Wines