"Damn, this is a thing!": S.C. Pannell's 2023 Sunrise and Sunset release

When Stephen Pannell was young, the only grape variety that existed – at least in his mind – was pinot noir. “I was obsessed with it,” he says. He sought the grape out wherever he worked, from Seppelt to Garrett to Wirra Wirra to Knappstein. But when he landed at Hardys Tintara in the mid ’90s; “There was no pinot.” 

There was a lot of grenache, though. And even though “you were like a salmon swimming in the opposite direction if you wanted to make medium-bodied wines in that era,” Steve adds, “I began to make grenache like I’d made pinot… this obsession with it just grew from there”. 

Between that first at Tintara in 1995, founding S.C. Pannell in 2004, and now – Steve’s made a lot of grenache. Still, despite his influence on McLaren Vale’s modern grenache movement and the subsequent explosion of the category, it took until last year for him to release an ultra-premium expression. 

“I didn't want to do that until I owned the vineyard, because I couldn't get the control that I was after,” he says. 

Steve Pannell.

In 2021, he finally found and bought the perfect grenache vineyard, in the Blewitt Springs dress circle (“High Sands is to the south, the MMAD vineyard is to the west, to the north is Trot and to the east is the Brini vineyard…”). A third of the 9ha site he renamed Little Branch is comprised of century-old grenache vines. In terms of quality, “it’s like three hectares of Montrachet,” Steve says. 

From these, he makes two wines, each priced at $250. The Sunrise Grenache, sourced from the block that gets the most morning sun, is typically “a little brighter and finer” than the Sunset Grenache, which shows “more flesh and darker fruits” thanks to its source block’s lengthy afternoon solar exposure. Both are wines of "depth and structure". 

Due to a mishap in the winery, only the Sunrise was released last year. It made waves, nonetheless.

“Damn, this is a thing!” wrote Marcus Ellis in his review of the 2022 Sunrise 99 (99 was the age of the vines at harvest). “It’s impossibly deep and moody, intense, yet also not, with all the fragrant delicacy and detail of the great grenaches of today… But individual. Utterly so.”

With wife Fiona Lindquist in the Little Branch vineyard.

The 2023 Sunrise 100 and 2023 Sunset 100, which will be released later this month (see Marcus’ reviews below), will undoubtedly, and deservedly, be similarly lauded. But while there’s no question that these wines make a statement, for Steve, it comes back to expressing place.

“I think the most important thing is to show where a wine has come from; that really tastes like it comes from an Australian landscape,” he says.

“Grenache is a beautiful magnifying glass for the different types of landscapes that exist in the part of the world where I make wine, and it's the power of that landscape or that sense of place in those wines that we're looking to hunt for and protect.” 

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