Dr Edge Ambrosia 2023 (Orange) WHOLE BUNCH WINES

It wasn’t the winemaking bug that originally struck Peter Dredge; it was a discus to the head.

Shattering the young athlete’s dreams of a sporting career, leaving him deaf in one ear and needing rehabilitation to regain his balance, Dredge put his sports science studies on hold to take a gap year of manual labour. It was then, working vintage at Petaluma with Brian Croser and Con Moshos that Dredge’s talents beyond the sports field were unveiled. Work on the vineyard was tough with Dredge coming close to giving up on his new passion more than once, yet he persevered, even taking an opportunity to work with Germany’s Dr Loosen on the revered Mosel Riesling. It might have been a jungle sometimes, but it turned out that being pushed by Crose to the edge early in his promising career would eventually trawl Dredge closer to the edge of the world: Lutruwita.

Dredge, respectfully drawn out by his winemaking friends to the moniker Dr Edge, moved to Tasmania as the Senior Winemaker for Bay of Fires, which allowed him to gain a great understanding of the island’s cool climate viticulture and diverse terroir.

And so the Dr Edge label was born, with a compass of wines to explore the diverse terroir from single vineyard sites in each the north, east and south of the Apple Isle. Dr Edge wines are lees-aged with the help from a little funky yeast, and are un-dredged, ie unfined/unfiltered. The compass series are all vinified in exactly the same minimal intervention way to truly express Lutruwita.