Maxwell Wines

Maxwell Wines is a South Australian winery in the McLaren Vale viticultural area. It is best known for its red wines, especially from Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon, as well as having several plots of vines planted in the first half of the 20th century.

The winery was founded by the Maxwell family who had been growing vines and making their own wine since the early 1900s. Ken Maxwell started the family's first commercial winer,y on the McLaren Vale property, in 1970. Named Daringa Cellars, it had a tiny production consisting mostly of red wines from the likes of Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon. In 1979 Ken sold the winery and established Maxwell Wines. Finding gorwing success in the 1990s the family relocated in 1997 to a custom built, three-story, gravity-fed winey in the heart of McLaren Vale just north of the town itself.

The estate covers a little more than 36 hectares (90 acres) of vineyards on southern-exposed alluvial soils. It has several historic plots including a Grenache vineyard first planted in the 1930s, and a Shiraz vineyard planted in the 1950s. Production is focused on red varieties and in smaller quantities the winery also grows Tempranillo, Grenache, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Malbec and the white variety Verdelho. Maxwell Wines also has a long history of making a range of commercial mead and counts itself as the largest mead producer in the Southern Hemisphere.