Living on the edge: Peter Dredge, Dr Edge

When Peter Dredge was in his final year of high school in Adelaide, he was hit in the temple with an errant discus during athletics training, which fractured his skull, severed his cochlear nerve and put him in hospital and rehab for months. “I was a bit of a jock, I wanted to play professional AFL football and be a physiotherapist,” he says. But the accident, which left him with ongoing balance issues and permanent hearing loss in his left ear, ended any hopes of a career in sport.

“I tried to play football after I went back to high school, but I couldn’t hear where things were coming from, and whenever I took my eyes off the ground, I’d become dizzy. I couldn’t focus without feeling nauseous.” 

It took Peter two years to finish year 12, but still he left school with no greater clarity around his future. “I was a little bit lost,” he says, and “not a very happy chappy, underneath the scenes.” A lifeline came in the form of Brian Croser. His mum and Brian knew each other a little, and after hearing about his condition and knowing he was strong in the sciences, Brian offered Peter a summer job in the lab at Petaluma. He calls it his sliding doors moment. “I got into winemaking by accident, literally.” 

Peter Dredge. Photo credit: Milton Wordley.

He worked at Petaluma for almost 12 years, in a variety of roles across lab, cellars and winery. “As a teenager with obvious head-trauma issues and related-trauma issues, it was nice to be mentored and brought into an environment that was very friendly,” he says. Throughout, he completed the winemaking degree at Adelaide Uni, and worked a vintage at Dr Loosen in Germany. In 2006, he was promoted to senior white winemaker and got the experimental Petaluma Project Co. up and running. By the time he resigned in 2009, he was making sparkling, too.

It was also at Petaluma that he was first called Dr Edge. Few read into the moniker today as more than a play on his surname – in fairness, it’s hard to picture the charming, genuine, amiable, irreverent and funny-as-hell Peter ‘Dredgey’ Dredge any other way – but it was more a reflection on his mental state when he started in ’97. “I was very shy, I couldn’t hear, I was still coming out of a deep depression,” he says. “The winemakers called me Dr Edge because I was on the edge. They couldn’t tell if I was an intelligent, funny, aspiring winemaker, or on the edge of going up into the bell tower and shooting them all.”

Dr Edge labels feature artwork by Massive Attack's Robert del Naja.

That he was listening to a lot of “moody, depressing trip-hop” by artists like Portishead, DJ Shadow and Massive Attack didn’t help his cause, but was integral to his recovery. Among the albums he “inflicted” on the Petaluma cellars was a compilation series ironically called Headz, which featured cover artwork by Massive Attack band member, artist and renowned philanthropist Robert del Naja. Peter had been chewing on the idea of starting his own label during his final years at Petaluma, although at the time it was just a “snippet of a pipe dream… I didn’t have confidence in my experience yet”. He did know, though, that when it happened, he wanted his labels to “have some of those very evocative portraits from those album covers on them.” 

After resigning from Petaluma, he left South Australia to take up the senior winemaker role at Bay of Fires in Tasmania, initially just as a maternity leave cover. Again, that 12-month contract turned into a five-year job. It was a “fantastic experience” for myriad reasons, particularly the relationships he built with the 13 growers he worked with across the state. But in 2015, after Moorilla winemaker Conor van der Reest offered him space to make his own wine at the MONA-based facility, Peter finally decided to jump out of the corporate frying pan. Using fruit sourced from Joe Holyman at Stoney Rise plus two other growers he’d worked with while at Bay of Fires – Meadowbank, and a vineyard now owned by Handpicked – he made the first 200 cases of Dr Edge Pinot Noir.