Description / Reviews
// Springs Hill Vineyard established in 1974 with the Grenache planted in 2007.
Skye Salter, Charlie Seppelt and Gary Whaite grew the Grenache for the 2025 Vintage.
"Ironstone conglomerate mixed with sand and gravel over mottled orange yellow clay at various depths. Part of the North Maslin Sand formation. 200m Altitude. Sitting on a ridge above and benefitting from the orographic lift of McLaren Vale. Facing North on a gentle slope above the Onkaparinga Gorge. Dry grown. 172 days in a sandstone amphora." - Mark Bulman, Winemaker
"Dry and ethereal, this exudes fresh early-season cherries: those long-awaited first cherries with skins that are firm and tight but not yet quite at their deepest colour. There’s also bruised wild thyme, torn sage, autumn leaves, saffron and ‘Mr Lincoln’ rose petals.
As you work the glass, Sushi-train pink ginger works its way into the olfactory mix along with those same cherries, pink peppercorns and Ras el Hanout. Zesty on the palate, its spring loaded, tightly wound and deliciously tense. So precise. Cherry pip tannins build with airtime and crescendo inevitably into a long amaro finish. Thoughtful winemaking, this is elemental, fine-featured, energetic, very serious and seriously delicious." – Grant Dickson
"I stood near this wine for a couple of hours. I smelled it. I didn’t taste it. When I finally did, I swore out loud. My daughter popped her head out of her room and asked, Are you OK dad? This Bulman is the shit, I said. She said, What? I said, I’ll tell you later.
I shouldn’t say this but it comes to pass that I taste the new Bulman releases, each year, somewhere in the vicinity of the time when I taste the new Penfolds releases. There are only two Bulman grenache wines released and there are roughly 503 Penfolds wines released, so the two tastings aren’t comparative. And yet the juncture of these tastings is always such an interesting moment in my mind. I love Penfolds, I shouldn’t but I do. But when I taste the wines of Bulman and others like it I wonder why I bother with the corporate stuff at all. Every wine industry needs a hinterland and the Bulman wines and those like it are that hinterland. They are what wine love springs from. Bulman exists up river, right up near the source.
This wine saw whole bunches, but only 14% of them. It spent 21 days on skins pre-ferment, 32 days in ferment, and 38 days on skins post ferment. It then cubby-housed away for 172 days in a sandstone amphora. It was grown on the Springs Hill Vineyard, established 1974. Skye Salter, Charlie Seppelt and Gary Whaite tended the vineyard through the 2025 growing days.
This wine is insanely good. Not only is it transfixing, but there’s a logic and an explain to the transfix. It’s a web-like wine with such genuine translucence that drinking it is like looking at a bare mid-riff uninterrupted. It drives red berries into orange blossoms, stones into black tea, woody spice into a marriage of red roses. The colour of this wine is more art-house than Hollywood; it’s light and delicate, like fragility in red. What made me swear though, out loud, was the tannin. The tannin here is like an argument where everyone is in furious agreement. This wine exists on the edge of tension, in the space where joy peeps above heartache. It’s sure. It takes your hand. It comforts and it holds. If you took a dress and cut it back to a skirt and trailed it through dirt and berries and dew, you’d have this wine, or the idea of it. It’s light. And it’s shockingly good." - 97 Points, Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front
