Hoffman family vines in northern Barossa Valley the shiraz source for range of top South Australia wine brands
Adrian Hoffman with shiraz vines on the property developed by his German Lutheran migrant family ancestors at the northern Ebernezer district of Barossa Valley.
The Hoffman family’s grapes from the northern Ebenezer district had a dramatic impact in elevating the Barossa Valley’s shiraz statue globally.
The Hoffmans were among the German Lutheran migrants who settled the Ebenezer district in the 1850s, with one group starting a tiny village they called Neukirch, with a church and blacksmith shop surrounded by small farms and devout families. Halfway point between the copper mining centre of Kapunda and the banks and monied dealers in Angaston, it became a place to swap horses and wagons on the way. The village never developed further but the Lutherans and their farms stayed.
After World War I, when German place names were wiped from the South Australia map, Neukirch became Dimchurch, though the original name was restored in 1975.
The Hoffmans had started there in the late 1850s with modest slab hut and mixed farm included vegetables, orchards and dairy cattle. From the 1880s on the Dallwitz Block, they added grape vines planted between 1888 and 1912. This would establish their area’s pedigree among other nearby notable wine districts such as Moppa, Kalimna and Koonunga. Six generations later in the 21st Century, Adrian Hoffmann had grown the property to 135 hectares as Dimchurch Vineyards, with newer plantings through the 1990s until the 2020s across several separate block names. Its grapes were first sold to Benno Seppelt at Seppeltsfield.
Penfolds was a major outlet until the 1990s when the Hoffmanns began to diversify their client list. Rockford took its first load of Ebenezer-grown shiraz in 1992, important to the famed Rockford Basket Press Shiraz and its winemaker Chris Ringland who recalled: “The Ebenezer fruit was very characteristic and unique in that very traditional big blackberry chocolatey shiraz expression. It was one of 30 vineyards in Basket Press Shiraz, but its contribution in terms of style and the oak profile it enabled certainly outweighed its proportion in terms of impact in the final wine.”
The reputation of the Hoffmann blocks’ Ebenezer-grown fruit grew to seeing it provide for producers such as Glaetzer, Two Hands, Torbreck, John Duval, Hayes Family Wines, Sami-Odi, First Drop, Soul Growers, The Standish Wine Company, Tomfoolery, Eisenstone and Chris Ringland’s own branded wines. Adrian Hoffman also released wines under the Dimchurch Vineyards label, as well as a smaller releases called Mt Charles and Tribus.
Adrian Hoffmann preferred to identify his vineyards’ area as “North Barossa” to get away from the legal issues surrounding the use of “Ebenezer” and also because “North Barossa is more about the style and the generosity, the length and depth of the wine that comes from here.”