Clare Valley
The Blame

We blame the booze. The whiff and the swill did us in and all that was left to do was to make more. In many ways the wines that weren’t worth the pull on the cork caused this as much as the wines that we will never have the pleasure of decorking again. This is Passion, a monster bigger than the three of us that leads us to soapbox, grandstand and sometimes pass out on the couch.

We wanted to do something that had been done before, to make exceptional wine with small estate charm.

The ethos is simple, self centred, and just a little arrogant - We make charismatic wines that are true to what we think ‘wine’ should be about. If someone doesn’t like the way we do it then they had better put the bottle down because there’s already not enough to go around.

Each wine, each vintage, and each label is a moment that will never come again - a winemaker should only ever promise to be consistently good, never just consistent. Each time we make a wine it may be the last wine we make - and if it isn’t worthy of being the last then it will never wear the Some Young Punks name.

We believe that awesome wine is a powerful aid to creativity; there is always the danger that while drinking a bottle of Punks you may also be pushed to acts of random winemaking, it definitely keeps us ticking over.

The Evidence

I refer you, the jury, to the gaudy bottles of plonk stamped Some Young Punks. It’s OK to judge a book by it’s cover; we judged the covers of books to decide on these labels. We need you to see us, and we don’t have lineage, or tithe - not even a family crest to take up the paper on the glass. These labels are as bright and bold as the wines they clothe. Fresh Classics printed in glorious Punknicolor.

The wines almost made themselves. The best fruit always does. But even the best fruit won’t jump into a crusher by itself so we help out a little in that respect. This beautiful tradeoff left us plenty of time to talk and drink and then talk some more. And when it was time we bottled it. Presto.

The Suspects

In the case of Jen Gardner we have a straight-A student, with a PhD and a long line of important publications led astray by a love of The Wild Wine. A sad case of a good kid mixed up with the wrong type of wine, now she rarely even inoculates her ferments, preferring instead to let them run wild as she now does.

Colin McBryde was always a troublemaker, fleeing wineries in New Zealand and the Americas, he now operates out of Australia’s Clare Valley. He is truly an incorrigible winemaker, understood only by the yeast that helped him nab his PhD from Adelaide University.

A truly insidious miscreant, Nic Bourke does whatever it takes to make the best wine. Those that stand in his way soon learn that winemaking is serious work except when it isn’t. McLaren Vale plays host to his hijinx but one region is never enough, and no variety is too big to be brought back down to size by a big enough crusher.

Approach all three with caution - especially if they are anywhere near a bottle of wine. An opinion is only worth something when strongly held and these people have a helluva grip