Eleven years after the official settlement of South Australia, two brothers stumbled across a piece of land lying between two rivers. The rest, as they say, is history.
The year was 1847, and William and Johan Jacob knew this was no ordinary patch of dirt. Situated between Jacob’s Creek and the North Para River, the brothers planted Shiraz, naming the vineyard ‘Moorooroo’ – an aboriginal word meaning ‘meeting of two waters’.
The vineyard passed into the hands of the Gramp family, where it remained for over 100 years until Ed Schild purchased it to add to his father’s Three Springs Farm property. The ancient vines are now painstakingly tended by Ed and his son Michael.
‘Ancestor Vines’ such as those at Moorooroo are so called because their cuttings helped to populate Barossa vineyards. Many of Australia’s grape-growing heritage sites were destroyed during the Government ‘vine pull’ scheme in the 1980s – even Moorooroo did not escape unscathed.
Just four rows of these 163 year-old vines survive, making each vintage of Moorooroo Shiraz a drop of pure bottled history.