Seppeltsfield's most valuable possession is an instruction rather than a vineyard. In 1878 Benno Seppelt filled a single puncheon of fortified Shiraz in the Barossa Valley and left word that it was not to be touched for a hundred years, and that a barrel should be laid down every vintage after it. Nobody has broken the chain since. That is more or less the whole product.
What it built is a cellar holding an unbroken run of single-vintage tawny stretching back 149 harvests, and a release schedule no rival can enter. One barrel comes out each year at exactly a century old. Anyone starting the same idea from scratch this morning would need the rest of the century before the first bottle was ready.
Seppeltsfield
Critics have responded about as you would expect. Decanter scored the 1889 at a hundred points, and no other producer in Femente's Barossa records sits higher on peak rating. What gets scored, though, is not craft in the ordinary sense. Nobody blended this, adjusted it, or made a stylistic decision about it within living memory. It is oak and evaporation in a hot valley, left alone for a century.
All of which makes Seppeltsfield closer to a bank than a producer. Every vintage it withdraws one barrel and deposits another, and almost everything it owns is stock it is forbidden to sell. The Grenache and the younger tawnies pay the bills. The thing the place is famous for was settled by a man long dead, and the only skill anyone has needed since is the discipline not to interfere.
