Galli Estate’s young gun winemaker, Ben Ranken, attributes his interest and deep passion for wine to a little town at the foothills of the Snowy Mountains in NSW called Tumbarumba where his family lived and worked on their farm and vineyard.

As a budding winemaker, Ben picked grapes in the local district after school and on summer holidays before completing his University degree (Winemaking at CSU Wagga). Under the best possible tutelage of Steve Webber of De Bortoli in the Yarra Valley, Ben honed his skills with the expert and fell in love with the career path he had chosen.

Inspired and ready for his next experience, Ben spent over an eight-year period swapping hemispheres, with winemaking stints in ten different regions of France as well as America and a number of regions in Australia.

His most memorable experiences were in Burgundy working at Domaine Michel Juillot, where every meal was enjoyed in the cellar with a glass of wine. Even breakfast was matched to a Pinot Rose. A year later in 2004 Ben worked in the Pic Saint Loop, near Montpellier, at Domaine Clavel and in Pomerol in 2006 at Chateau Lafleur.

Today, Ben approaches winemaking with a minimalist hand. He prefers to use natural wild yeasts, some natural malolactic fermentation and limited filtration. He channels his inner pagan and racks on weeks of the new moon and is free to indulge with some considered experimentation. In the vineyard, viticulturalists John Armstrong and Stuart Wareham, who between them have been managing Galli’s Sunbury and Heathcote vineyards for almost twenty years, make sure Ben has access to prime fruit.