Margaret River was a hypothesis before it was a wine region. Climate research in the mid-1960s suggested this remote corner of Western Australia matched Bordeaux's growing conditions better than anywhere else on the continent, and a Perth cardiologist named Tom Cullity decided to test the claim with his own money and weekends. Vasse Felix, the vineyard he planted in 1967, was the region's first.
Proof took five years. Cullity's 1972 releases, a Cabernet blend and a Riesling, were Margaret River's first serious wines, made through vintages that gave him bird strikes, mildew, and almost no fruit. His stubbornness mattered more than his technique: once those bottles showed the climate paper was right, plantings followed across the region.
Stewardship since has been unusually stable. Ownership passed to the Holmes à Court family in 1987, and Virginia Willcock has run the winemaking since 2006, long enough to define a recognizable house style: Cabernet Sauvignon built on fine, dusty tannin and Chardonnay picked for nerve rather than weight. Critics treat the estate as the region's reference point, and Wine Advocate rated both the 2017 and 2020 vintages at 98 points.
Vasse Felix
Today's flagship red carries the founder's name: Tom Cullity, a Cabernet-led blend from the original 1967 plantings. It's a quiet piece of circularity. The estate that proved the hypothesis now bottles its best wine from the very rows that ran the experiment.
