In today’s episode, which is part one of two, Elena Brooks from Dandelion Vineyards shares how she went from making pantyhose-filtered wines as a teenager in Bulgaria to a true winemaking visionary in South Australia. Elena has multiple wine brands, including three that we import: Dandelion, Sister’s Run, and Heirloom Vineyards. All of these brands are based in McLaren Vale but feature varietal wines from all over South Australia. Elena makes some of our highest volume wines, but don’t confuse that for low quality. These wines often come from single, old-vine sites, and they are drinkable and acid-driven while staying true to the benchmark styles of their respective regions.

Elena has made quite a name for herself in Australia and the US, and her path to success success was entirely self-made. It involved immigrating from Bulgaria to Australia around the age of twenty and learning the customs and language of a new country. In this episode, you’ll hear how Elena’s first experience with wine was at a 45,000-ton Bulgarian winery that employed 500 people, including her mom. When communism fell in 1990, an influx of foreigners, namely Australians, came to work at this winery for big supermarket brands. At the age of 12, Elena was interpreting at the winery after school, and a few years later she’d move to Adelaide to study winemaking. Elena was drawn not only to the winemaking side but the marketing of wine, as marketing wasn’t exactly a thing in communist Bulgaria. She’s a true entrepreneuer in every sense of the word, diving not only into the product, wine, but the sales, marketing, and philosophy of the product.

Part one sets us up for part two, which delves into Elena’s wines, the challenges and opportunities in Australia today, and which region Elena would classify as Grand Cru if Australia used the cru system.

To begin, we have to go all the way back to Elena’s childhood in Communist-era Bulgaria, when she remembers tasting her very first wine, a sparkling herb infused white wine…

00:29 Wine Culture in Bulgaria

01:32 Childhood Entrepreneurial Ventures

03:43 The Analytical Mind Behind Winemaking

06:27 Accidental Entry into the Wine World

15:36 Transition to Australia

18:44 Starting Dandelion Vineyards

Hosted by Charlotte Alsaadi.

Special thanks to SNACKTIME for the music!

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