On last November’s third Monday, I facetiously told my friend Pete Fraser that he owed me lifelong gratitude. I’d driven three hours to taste 15 vintages of his High Sands Grenache, eat a quick lunch, and drive three more home. I joked there are very few wines—and even fewer winemakers—worthy of that kind of effort, and he would live out his days in my debt. It turns out I undersold that debt. Ten days later, he was dead.
When I left that day, I told him it may just have been the most profound tasting I’d done all year. A clearly defined story of how a certain kind of dirt gets under the skin of a certain kind of man and how each draws something from the other hitherto unseen. Telling him he should be proud was the last thing I said to him. There’s the smallest comfort in the smile on his face that said he was.
Polishing the jewel
When Jess Jackson crossed the Pacific in the early 2000s to purchase the assets of a financially imperiled McLaren Vale producer, he gained some great vineyards, a workable winery, and a young winemaker better endowed with enthusiasm than experience. The property was renamed Yangarra—“from the earth” in Kaurna, the language of the area’s traditional custodians—and over the next two decades, Pete and viticulturist Michael Lane worked hard to expand the property’s plantings and even harder to polish the jewel at its heart.
At the highest point of the 170ha (420-acre) Yangarra property sits a little over 18ha (44 acres) of bush-vine Grenache planted in 1946 on the North Maslin Sands. These soils, most prevalent around the subregion of Blewitt Springs, are a distinctive part of the ancient geology of McLaren Vale. Clay as the base beneath ferruginous sandstone; above that a layer of pure silica so fine that its use in an hourglass would trigger deep existential dread.
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At the highest point of this highest point is a 1.7ha (4.2-acre) parcel where that silica runs more than 3ft (one meter) deep. Spending time with Pete in this part of the vineyard was always a chance to see one of his finest qualities emerge: a boyishly enthusiastic curiosity and sense of wonder.
I’ve never seen vines so tenuously anchored. Press them lightly, and they move. You fear a violent sneeze in case its force uproots them. These are the vines that made High Sands. The tasting we did the week before he died was the story of how Pete learned to listen to them. He first kept separate those vines on the deepest sand in 2005. “I knew enough to vinify them separately, I just didn’t know enough to do them justice.”
In 2006 and 2007, the year the vineyard was certified biodynamic, Pete made wines that smelled and tasted of potential. The brutal late-season heat waves of 2008 and 2009 didn’t produce High Sands. Pete deliberately began what would be his last tasting with the 2010, the first time the ambition that stalked understanding really had a visual on the target. Year on year, the focus tightened, and the picture became clear. Fruit handling became gentler; oak impact receded with the deployment of larger formats and greater use of ceramic vessels.
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High Sands has to be considered one of the most significant sites for Grenache anywhere on the planet, and wines like the 2015, 2018, 2021, and 2023 some of the finest examples ever made of the variety’s ability to seduce through fragrance and satisfy through structure.
A significant moment
I made several phone calls on the drive home, the kind you make when emotion and excitement emulsify, telling those forced to listen I’d just witnessed a significant moment in Australian wine history. I decided there and then the next time I was asked to fill this page, I’d tell the story of that day.
And I’ve wrestled ever since with how I tell the story of that Monday in the shadow of the following Thursday. I’ve landed on this.
Too often we fill graves with platitudes, but the only way to deal with this story is to stare into an uncomfortable truth. Pete made his own exit, and he did it in a way designed to inflict the greatest emotional damage on those he felt had hurt him.
He couldn’t see he would hurt so many more.
It was painfully public, and in a small town like Adelaide, surrounded by vineyards and drenched in wine, the death of a high-profile winemaker becomes a tabloid news story where nuance and understanding are sacrificed for sensationalism. It has allowed people to take positions on who Pete was without the insight or experience to validate them.
I’ve struggled every day in the months since to connect the man I knew with the way his life ended. Those who knew him far better are, if possible, even more baffled.
These things rarely make sense, but this one’s unfathomable. In many ways it’s unforgivable. In time, we’ll try. But for now we have this clumsy attempt to wrestle back the narrative, to remember who Pete Fraser really was.
He was the guy whose whole face crinkled when he smiled; the weird cat who, when he put on his first pair of shorts in early spring, would persevere and not wear long pants until deep into the next winter.
He could see a silent pain in others that seems almost eerie now. He tried to help where he could.
He stood still and quiet long enough in a special place to hear what it was saying and used his own talents to share that with us.
He made beautiful wines, and he was my friend.
I miss him.
