Dr Edge

A 10-year retrospective tasting of 48 wines from this little-known Tasmanian winery has highlighted the skill of their unconventional, music-obsessed maker

- CASSANDRA CHARLICK

Growth occurs at the edge of one's comfort zone, and it's safe to say that Tasmanian winemaker Peter Dredge's life has remained constantly on the precipice of comfort.

While he hails from South Australia, he's not from a wine family, and his winemaking journey hasn't followed a conventional path. In fact, there's nothing conventional about Dredge. 'I was a bit of a jock. I wanted to play AFL [Australian rules football] and be a physio. Unfortunately, an errant discus got me in the head in my last year of high school,' he says, while placing a record onto the decks at the tasting table. Rehabilitation followed, but while he (mostly) recovered his balance, the future of a sports career and the hearing in his left ear never returned.

Dredge's setback cost him an extra year of school, following which (and a gap year) he landed a lab job at Petaluma with Brian Croser in 1997. 'I fell in love with the wine industry,' he says. 'I was in a pretty low place and listening to very dark, evocative 1990s trip hop, mostly based around Massive Attack. I was making the cellar hands listen to this morose stuff. Ironically, it's called the Headz series, and I'd just been clocked in the head.'

After a 12-year tenure at Petaluma, he leapt to the cooler climes of Tasmania and joined Bay of Fires, staying there for the next five years. 'We worked with 13 growers around Tasmania,' he says. 'I pitched the idea for a bit of sub-regional differentiation between the Bay of Fires Pinot and Rieslings, but that wasn't the direction they wanted to take.' Thankfully, they didn't. 'When I started Dr Edge, that's where the north-, the east- and the south-style wines started to eventuate.'