How Australia’s Late Guru of Grenache Forever Changed the Way I Think About Wine

By WineBottleMag
December 14, 2025
Australias Changed Grenache Guru Late Wine
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I’m on the treadmill in my parents’ basement attempting to burn off Thanksgiving calories and scrolling my Instagram feed when I learn the news: Peter Fraser, Yangarra’s longtime chief winemaker and general manager, was found dead in a house fire on November 27th. I nearly tumble off the treadmill.

How could it be?

Fraser was 51 years old, at the prime of his career, father to young children. An affable, humble, generous spokesperson not only for his renowned South Australian brand, but for the whole McLaren Vale region, earning him the nickname “Vale Pete.” One of Australia’s finest winemakers, he shone a light on Rhône varieties—especially Grenache—proving they could shimmer with elegance and energy in a warm, Mediterranean climate, provided they were farmed well and gently crafted. Fraser was an early champion of organics and biodynamics. Alongside his longtime viticulturist, Michael Lane, the pair cut synthetic inputs from the vineyards in 2008, eight years after California’s Jackson Family Wines brought Fraser on to spearhead their new Aussie winery. He was a gentle soul, whose wines, as the Australian wine writer Campbell Mattinson so fittingly wrote in a tribute to Fraser the day following his death, “celebrated quietness in a way that, ironically, made us all want to shout about them.”

And now he is gone. I’ve not reached the shouting stage of grief yet; I’m more at the staring-out-a-window-in-disbelief stage, with the numbness that comes after the gut punch of tragic and sudden death.

My mind is a swirl of memories and encounters with Fraser over the 12 years I knew him, from my very first visit to Yangarra in October 2013, when he and his wines helped me wrap my tongue around texture in a way I never had before. It reframed the way I think about wine.

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The Grenache Guru

I was ten months into my new life in Australia’s west. Fraser’s star was rising, but the brand was yet to be widely known.

We’re rumbling in his truck through the vineyards tucked between eucalypt groves across the 420-acre property—over half of which were left to native vegetation—stopping often to walk the rows of newly planted Rhône whites, like Roussanne and Grenache Blanc, and to kneel in the ancient Maslin sands of the Shiraz and Grenache bush vines originally planted in 1946 by the multigenerational Smart family (growers for some of McLaren Vale’s top boutique labels). As Fraser does for many visitors to his beloved corner of the Blewitt Springs subregion, perched on the more elevated northern edge of the Vale, he scoops up handfuls of ancient iron-rich sandstone and pours the fine grains into my hands. He wants me to understand the connection between his wines and the place. His passion for connecting earth to glass is clear from day one.

We’re in Yangarra’s then-cozy (these days fancy) tasting room. Fraser pours me his latest releases. There’s a wild ferment 2012 Roussanne that’s lemony and honeyed with medicinal herbs. It’s fresh yet viscous. (I know this because I am an unashamed packrat and the notebook from my visit sits in a towering pile on my desk in my current home in upstate New York). A 2013 “PF” Shiraz, a preservative-free bottling made at the height of South Australia’s natural wine scene, is bright and slinky. Collectively, the range demonstrates Fraser’s ability to make delicious wines in a vast array of styles and price points, from picnic-friendly Picpoul to bold, age-worthy “Ironheart” Shiraz.

Then there’s High Sands Grenache, Fraser’s most acclaimed wine (although the accolades, at this stage, have yet to roll in). This vintage is 2010, and I describe it as “earthy and floral with fabulous acidity, sexy tannins, and juicy red fruit. Beautifully put together.” Tasting notes not dissimilar to those I’ve written for nearly every vintage since.

Grenache was Fraser’s love language. As Anthony Madigan, editor-in-chief of Australia’s Wine Business Monthly, wrote, “He had Grenache on a string; took it for a walk like a puppy dog.” He transformed the way that Australia and the world viewed this grape variety.

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But I believe his talent stretched equally across Yangarra’s range, united by a common through line: texture. Fraser was a master of “mouthfeel.” He believed it as important as flavor: an essential organ, wine’s beating heart. It’s something that sticks with me from that very first tasting. Fraser had a way of capturing the silkiest, sexiest elements of a wine—whether satiny, oily, crunchy, pithy, creamy, or fleshy—without losing vibrancy. Before it became commonplace, he used various vessels to help achieve this. His collection of concrete eggs would swell to over three dozen over the years.

His innovative style and approach is why I nominated him as Winemaker of the Year for Wine Enthusiast’s 2018 Wine Star Awards, and Yangarra for New World Winery of the Year in 2024.

But I wasn’t the only one awed by Fraser’s winemaking prowess. Far from it. Fraser went on to win the prestigious Halliday Australian Winemaker of the Year Award in 2015, and two of his top Grenache wines nabbed Halliday’s Wine of the Year in 2020 and 2024. He was named as one of 2025’s Top 100 Master Winemakers in the UK’s Wine Business.

The Down-to-Earth Son of a Chicken Farmer

Fraser earned high praise after landing a top job with one of the world’s best known and funded wine groups. Yet, with all his success, all the awards and acclaim—in true Australian fashion—he never got too big for his boots.

Fraser’s beginnings were humble. He grew up near McLaren Vale in a family of chicken farmers, and he later sold their manure as a side hustle. He served time in the Army Reserves. He planned to become a veterinarian, but winemaking called him instead.

After earning an oenology degree at the University of Adelaide in 1994, Fraser worked at regional wineries, including St. Hallet in the Barossa Valley. He made wine at Villa Robledo in Spain from century-old Garnacha. At the impressive age of 26, he became the chief winemaker at Norman’s Winery in McLaren Vale. When Jackson Family purchased Norman’s Clarendon Vineyard in 2000, re-branding it as Yangarra Estate, Fraser was entrusted to run the show. His time in Spain gave him the confidence to plant more Grenache, and to craft wines from the variety more intuitively than he’d been taught in oenology school. This intuition carried over to his relationships, too.

My mental Rolodex flips to the Covid years when virtual tastings are a regular occurrence. My annual Zooms with Fraser to taste his newest releases are some of the ones I most look forward to, not just because I know the wines will be stellar—they nearly always are—but also because I just enjoy talking with him. He breaks through the impersonalness of the screen, like he can see we both need the human connection. He asks about my young kids, similar ages to his own, and we compare notes on sleep (or lack thereof). I’m sure he was equally as thoughtful when hosting tastings for countless other members of the global wine community.

Working for a large international wine company like Jackson came with ambassadorship responsibilities and a good deal of travel. Fraser embraced both. He put in the time to visit the U.S. regularly and became an incredible spokesperson for Yangarra, the Vale, and Australia.

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“He understood that to sit back in Australia and hope that the needle would move in the US wasn’t going to happen—that it will take a concerted effort of promotion to help Americans re-discover the excellence that is Aussie winemaking,” says Napa-based Jackson Family Winemaker Chris Carpenter, who worked alongside Fraser for 14 years at Hickinbotham, the old-vine Bordeaux-variety label in the neighboring Clarendon subregion. “With his knowledge, easy manner, charm, blond hair, and chin dimple, he got a lot of people in a lot of American cities to consider the Aussie contribution to wine.”

Fraser’s ease is what sticks with me from my last in-person visit with him, almost exactly a year to the day of his death. Our visit is fleeting, I’ve got a packed schedule, but Fraser is, as always, present and passionate, a perfect mix of personal and professional. This time, we connect over our kids’ shared passion for horses (Fraser was a fine horseman himself). We’re getting more sleep than we were back in those Covid days.

It’s November 2024. By now Fraser’s working out of Yangarra’s spacious, flashy tasting room and cellar, built in 2023, with large glass windows for guests to ogle his vast array of concrete eggs. Wearing work boots, shorts, and a checked button-down shirt, he seems simultaneously at home and out of place in this new polished space. With prodding, Fraser admits he sometimes misses the old days when he and Lane were left to their own devices. Yangarra’s success has thrust Fraser further into a spotlight I think he always had mixed feelings about.

This son of a chicken farmer, was, I suspect, happiest in the natural world with family, dogs, and horses. Nevertheless, he shared his knowledge, land, time, and beautiful wines generously, always with a smile on his face.

And now Fraser will never make another beautiful wine for Yangarra again, a fact that so many are struggling to come to terms with.

“This news does not merely sadden the Australian and world wine community,” Mattinson says. “It breaks our hearts open, and sheds liquid in volume. Today, we bleed, for good, for proper, for Pete. There is shocking news and then there is news that shocks so hard that it’s hard to focus or work or walk or go on. This news of Pete Fraser’s passing is the kind of shock from which you never quite fully recover.”

Once we stop staring out the window, maybe we’ll crack open a bottle of High Sands Grenache and toast to “Vale Pete.” The master of texture was, as Carpenter puts it, “ One of the greatest Grenache and Rhône white winemakers on the planet.”

I couldn’t agree more.

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