Peter Lehmann founded his eponymous winery in 1979, partly as a means of helping with the glut of grapes then afflicting the Barossa. “I’ll take your grapes and turn them into wine,” he told the desperate growers, many of them conservative farmers of Silesian descent who regarded their old vines as part of their patrimony. “But I’ll only be able to pay you when I sell the wine.” They gratefully accepted. Without this deal, it is widely believed that the Barossa would have lost a large swathe of its old vines. The crisis passed, in large part thanks to Peter’s energy and vision, and the Lehmann winery became one of the Barossa’s, and Australia’s, most outstanding wineries. It was for his role as saviour of the Barossa and as the creator of this winery, that Peter was named ‘Personality of the Year’ by the International Wine Challenge in 2009.
With the ‘Margaret’ Semillon, named after Peter’s wife, they moved away from the heavier, oakier style of Barossa Semillon to something that was unoaked and more in the style of Hunter Valley Semillon, but with added ripeness. A former winner of the Barossa Semillon trophy at the International Wine Challenge, this is a wine of weight, complexity and zestiness.
