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McLaren Vale, the home of the Curtis Family Vineyards, is just 45 minutes’ drive south of South Australia’s capital of Adelaide, has been making wine for one and a half centuries. That’s not as long as wine has been made in Italy, but the results are just as encouraging. And how a family with its ancestry dating back to the 15th Century has brought its expertise to McLaren vale with a new range of wines with an impressive European lineage.

The Curtis Family Vineyards is established just west of the township of McLaren Vale in . Its vineyards have flourished and now its sought-after dry white and dry red table wines are available on the Australian and export markets.The story of the Curtis Family Vineyards is really the story of how everything old came new again…of how European immigrants came to Australia, struggled against the odds and then applied old world values and experience to produce fine wines.

The new faces behind the Curtis Family Vineyards are Mark, Thomas & Jenna Curtis, with the guidance of their father, Claudio Curtis who lives on the vineyard just outside McLaren Vale. The name Curtis is thought to derive from Curtius, a noble and wealthy family of the First and Second Centuries AD, the Roman Empire era originating from the Latinium people.

Records show that the Curtis Family name first appeared in Cervaro in 1471, a town established by the Latinium tribe in Central Italy around the Second Century AD. Cervaro is situated approximately 10klms south of the monastery town of Monte Cassino, the site of some of the bitterest fighting between the Allied and German forces in Italy during World war II. Winemaking – Red grapes are harvested at optimum flavour levels, after testing and monitoring of the maturity development, in the cool of the day and then destemmer crushed into fermentation tanks.

These three regions now produce approximately 75% of Australia’s winegrapes. These regions initially included major plantings of the classic table wine varieties, but in the early 1900s these were almost all replaced by fortified vine varieties to supply the United Kingdom market. This situation continued until the 1950s when an increasingly multicultural Australian population began demanding high quality table wines and the varietal mix again swung in favour of the classic wine varieties such as Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. Australia was fortunate in having large areas of Shiraz, originally planted for port wine styles, which, in the warm Australian climate, has proved to be ideally suited for the production of full-bodied red wine styles.

www.curtisfamilyvineyards.com

Want to find out more about mclaren vale, then visit Marco Polo’s site on how to choose the best Shiraz for your needs.