Ian Hongell
Senior Winemaker
What I love about the wine industry?
That I get to grow grapes and make wine for a living.
What wine out of the ones that you have made has the most interesting story behind it – and what is that story?
Peter Lehmann Shiraz celebrates the foundation gesture that Peter Lehmann intended when he and his team set out to preserve the Barossa’s vineyard heritage. Today this is realised by the purchasing of grapes and making a wine from every district in the Barossa. Few winemakers in the world get to so comprehensively source fruit from one region.
DID YOU KNOW?
Did you know the Barossa wine region to this day, has remained untouched by the vine disease Phylloxera, therefore making some of the Barossa Shiraz vines, the oldest vines in the world. Did you know the Peter Lehmann Wines Weighbridge was officially opened on 20th November 1979 by Albert Schmidt, one of our grape growers.
Queen of Clubs
According to renowned Barossan artist, Rod Schubert, the Queen of Clubs is "the gambler’s card". Indeed it was a great gamble that Peter Lehmann took when founding the company during the turbulent, uncertain times of the late 1970s and early 1980s as the Australian wine industry was faced with international competition and a grape surplus.
Peter Lehmann is a great fan of American author, Damon Runyon, who created memorable characters modelled on the colourful characters on New York’s fringes.
At this tumultuous time and inspired by one of Runyon’s more engaging characters, the gambler, Sky Masterson, Peter Lehmann said "If anything’s a gamble, this is, so we’ll call the company ‘Masterson’ – ‘Masterson Barossa Vignerons’".
Although trading as Masterson Barossa Vignerons until 1982, Peter Lehmann’s name was always on the label, with the Queen of Clubs proudly featuring as the logo.
In 1982 the company name was changed to Peter Lehmann Wines. In 1996 the Queen of Clubs took on a new, exciting personality for each of the wines, reflecting their individual style and character.
The Queen of Clubs
The Queen of Clubs has proudly been retained as the Peter Lehmann Wines’ corporate logo. She now has many faces, each one uniquely modelled on the individual wine style of our Barossa Art Series wine collection. In 1995, Peter Lehmann Wines commissioned young Australian artists to re-interpret the Queen of Clubs in the context of the variety of tastes, flavours, bouquets and defining characters of each of Peter Lehmann’s wines. This wonderfully innovative concept, bridging the art of winemaking and the art of painting, has resulted in an exciting and striking collection of dynamic images. The original artworks have been acquired by Peter Lehmann Wines and now adorn the walls of our Cellar Door.
Eight Songs
The inspiration for the naming of Eight Songs was drawn from a suite of eight paintings by Rod Schubert depicting the mental disintegration of England’s "Mad King" George III. These paintings were created after involvement in the 1993 Barossa Music Festival performance of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' tormented musical drama "Eight Songs for a Mad King", with texts by the poet, Randolph Stow. The Eight Songs suite of paintings was later acquired by Peter and Margaret Lehmann.
