Sister’s Run blends serious winemaking with a playful spirit, helmed by the skilled, Bulgarian-born winemaker, Elena Brooks, and her industry dilettante husband, Zar Brooks. As a young girl in Bulgaria, Elena’s mother worked in a winery. Perhaps ‘winery’ is an understatement; this was a 45,000-ton operation that employed 500 people and had their own dentist on site. 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 by 16 she was making her first batches of Chardonnay using her mom’s panty hose as a filter. 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 entrepreneur in every sense of the word, diving not only into the product, wine, but the sales, marketing, and philosophy of the product.

After living and studying in South Australia for a few years, Elena met who would become her husband, Zar, at a wine tasting panel in 2000. She stayed in Australia and worked at Redheads Studios for a a few years before she got the urge to go off on her own. She launched Dandelion Vineyards, a brand that aimed to tell a new story of South Australian wine, one of acid and tannin and aroma over fruit and alcohol alone. Not long after, she launched Heirloom Vineyards and Sister’s Run, the former focusing on the Adelaide Hills, and the latter focusing on McLaren Vale and Coonawarra. As for the name, Elena is a hands-on winemaker, often seen in steel cap boots while tending to vineyards, though she keeps high heels in her ute for unexpected invitations to wine show dinners. Returning from a “knees-up” at midnight, mid-vintage, she managed to kick off one high heel and slip back into a boot just as the cellar crew cried out, “Run sister run!” It was at this precise moment that the label was born.

The core ethos of Sister’s Run lies in its commitment to single-vineyard Chardonnay, Shiraz, and Cab sites across McLaren Vale and Coonawarra, a rare approach for such affordable wines. Elena sources from vineyards that are conventionally managed, with a strong focus on low water inputs. The wines are fermented with a partial native and partial house-cultured yeast strain, and they are fined and filtered. In a nutshell, Sister’s Run makes ‘new’ benchmark styles of single-vineyard, varietal, South Australian wines. In other words, these are not the knock-your-socks-off, big bold wines that used to characterize Australian benchmarks; while they are fruit forward, they have great natural acidity that leads to drinkability and food friendliness. Elena’s brands might be some of the highest volume in our book, but there is no sacrifice of quality or ethos. Balance, as always, is the name of the game.