In the early 2000s, a group of Australia’s top winemakers began a little after-hours experiment in a shuttered restaurant called RedHeads...

Each day, they worked for the country’s biggest names, producing large volumes of good-but-boring wine, with decisions driven by shareholders. Then, come quitting time, they’d slip off to their shared space to craft wines they wanted to make, using fruit sourced from lauded growers they met at their 9–5 jobs.

The resulting wines were nothing short of brilliant—small-batch creations unlike anything else on the market that sold out instantly and stunned critics. “Each wine is very different and has obviously been made with care and passion,” said Jancis Robinson, MW, of their early efforts.

Today, the RedHeads name remains, but the operation has grown up a lot, with head winemaker Darren Harvey now calling the shots in the cellar, and operations having moved to a custom-built sustainable winery that sits amongst elite producers in the Barossa. (Read more about that below.)

The 1888 Cabernet Sauvignon was one of the first creations to come out of the new facility, and while many of the wines in their range have come and gone in the interim, the team continues to make the cuvée vintage after vintage.

The bottle’s label pays tribute to this heritage and their progression: It features a caricature of an old cottage on the property, which dates back to 1888 and is one of the oldest buildings in the valley, plus the names of the wine's first 400 Vineyard Partners, whose support helped them forget about logistics and focus on making the best wine possible.