Elena Brooks is something of a wine prodigy, making her first wine at just 16 in her native Bulgaria. In the years since, she’s travelled extensively and settled in Australia with her husband Zar. Together they make a range of expressive, site-specific wines predominantly in the Eden Valley, McLaren Vale and Adelaide Hills, with their Dandelion Vineyards and Heirloom Vineyards projects.
Here, we delve deeper into Elena's story in wine and explore why these three regions in particular excite her so much about Australian wine.
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Let's start at the beginning. What made you fall in love with wine and winemaking?
I come from a wine-growing area in northern Bulgaria. My mum worked in marketing at this big winery that felt like a city of its own. 500 people worked there! It had a doctor, its own choir, its own library, and a live-in artist who created all their label artwork. It was an amazing place - my playground ever since I was about two years old. I knew I wanted to always be part of that environment since the age of five or six.
My mum used to have this very special, old, fortified sweet wine in the fridge. I think it was from about 1953. As children, we were allowed to have a little sip on special occasions. I used to think it was magic! It tasted of walnuts and figs and all sorts of things. I thought to myself, ‘if I can figure out how to make that, I’d be set for life!’. That was probably my first memory of really wanting to engage with wine.
After the fall of communism, big supermarkets like Sainsbury's and Tesco started sending Australian winemakers to work in Bulgarian wineries and make wines for them. I was the first generation of my family to learn English, so my mum would have me translate for them when I was 11. That’s how I started learning a lot about winemaking and technical wine language at a high level.
That sounds like an incredible, immersive learning experience
Absolutely, it opened my eyes to how winemaking isn’t just about making wines. It’s also about travelling, meeting different people and being exposed to different cultures. I really experienced that and how much joy and laughter it brought. I was a good student, and I loved studying art and science. Wine brought those two things together in such a beautiful way. I grew up in the wine industry, and I don’t think I ever really had a choice. I’ve loved it for so long.
My mum also helped with Bulgaria’s wine tourism, and I began interpreting for visitors and hosting tours when I was 15. So, I’ve developed that consumer understanding from a young age, too—that understanding of what makes a good wine that brings joy and happiness to a consumer, wines that people actually want to drink. That really set me up for the future.
Being able to balance what you want to make with what people want to drink isn’t easy.
Consumer understanding is really important. With Dandelion, I’ve always said that they are modern wines for a modern palate. I will have an idea of what I want to make, but I need to make sure that it is relevant to modern wine drinkers. We aim to make wines of place, with freshness that people will really enjoy drinking—wines that make us happy.
Barossa is a difficult place to make wine, and the consumer has an idea of what they want from the region, so you can often be punished if you don’t get that balance right. It’s hard to be innovative and traditional at the same time, even though the region suits trying new things. You are punished if you’re too innovative, but you’re also punished if you’re too traditional. What we do is often trying to push things as far as we can, but still staying in the lines of what is acceptable. Barossa has a brand identity in itself that other regions, like McLaren Vale for example, don’t have. We are conscious of that.
The idea of Barossa as a ‘brand’ makes it seem like people view it as a homogenous place. Do you think consumers understand that there’s a difference between Barossa Valley and Eden Valley with the region?
I think that there is becoming more of an understanding as the two are very different from each other, and this is more obvious with site-specific wines.
You don’t really have to do much in the Eden Valley other than capturing how uniquely beautiful and specific it is in the glass. In my eyes, if there is going to be a Grand Cru in the Barossa, it will be the Eden Valley. I just adore it, and everything coming from there is so recognisable.
Zar [Elena's husband and partner in Dandelion Vineyards] has judged around the world in every major wine show. He’s tasted wines that are the best examples of their place, and he always says that Eden Valley has a signature to it that you can spot straight away. I completely agree. You can even tell when a wine has had fruit from the Eden Valley added to it. It brings a certain fragrance and elegance to a Barossa regional blend.
The 'Red Queen' vineyard in the Eden Valley (Photography by Tony Tervoert)
What is it about the Eden Valley that creates this kind of expression in the fruit?
Eden Valley is hard to pin down. It has a very difficult climate, and every year, the vintage is different. The region definitely has heavy vintage variation. Within three years of making wine in the Eden Valley, I won ‘Best Wine in the Barossa’ with the Red Queen. Even then, I was speaking to Stephen Henschke and saying, ‘I still can’t figure this out’ because every vintage was different, and even after that success, the region remained elusive. And he looked at me and said, “I’ve been working in the Eden Valley for over 40 years, and I still don’t know either”. That really resonated. It’s so exciting to work here, but it’s difficult to get it right.
Making single vineyard wines in the Eden Valley, which is what we do, the main challenge is consistency. I think we manage this better with the Riesling, but with Shiraz, it’s tough. For example, we recently had a couple of cold years preceded by several very hot years. It’s two big extremes, and the wines reflect that in their style. We are beholden to Mother Nature. I am a great believer in spending time in the vineyard and then shaping your winemaking to the vines. In the Eden Valley, this is especially important; you have to be very switched on and in tune with what’s happening to make the best possible wines.
Do you work exclusively with your own vineyards across the Barossa, Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale, or do you also work with growers?
I am one of those people who gets super excited about a lot of different sites. There’s a reason why I make so many wines across our projects! So, we work with our own vineyards and growers with whom we’ve built relationships over the last 17 years. Occasionally, I’ll get excited by a newer vineyard, and so we will start working with new growers, too.
Working with our own vineyards and growers means we are more adaptable. It leaves us less exposed in harder years or with the changing climate, as we have more options for winemaking and blending. Last year, for example, we ended up with 50% of our production from McLaren Vale and only 25% from the Adelaide Hills, as the vintage was harder there. If we only worked in the Adelaide Hills, we’d be making far less wine than usual, which wouldn’t be sustainable.
What is your general approach to viticulture and winemaking?
I definitely take a relaxed approach! I don’t try to manipulate anything, so we are heavily reliant on what the weather gives us. I don’t like too much control in my winemaking. Control is important if things start going wrong or if you have a very difficult vintage. It’s important to know what to do in these instances, but for the majority of the time, I just step back and let things happen naturally.
Our home vineyard in McLaren Vale, where our cellar door is, is a 24-hectare biodynamic vineyard. McLaren Vale is a very small region, but it’s also one of the largest sustainable wine-growing regions in the world, which I think is very cool. It’s such a warm climate, so it’s very easy for most people to grow organically or biodynamically.
We are also working with a new certification system: Sustainable Winegrowing Australia. What I like about this is that it captures many organic principles, but it doesn’t stop there. There is so much more to it. For example, when it comes to sustainability, SWA encourages the installation of solar panels and water recycling. It’s about a holistic approach to the whole business rather than just what’s going on in the vineyard.
With organic, in a bad year, your options are either to spray and lose your certification or to grow bad grapes. However, with SWA, it's more realistic, and you can often keep your certification and still have those bad years. At the end of the day, you need to be able to make good wines that sell, pay your team and sustain your business. SWA doesn’t penalise you for that.
I don’t classify myself as a natural winemaker, but winemaking is a natural process. I prefer the term ‘minimal intervention’ to ‘natural’ because it more clearly explains what we do. However, we do inoculate, and that comes down to having some level of control, even if just a little.
It's exciting to use different yeasts to build flavour and best express the site. It’s like painting with oils; you build the image up in layers, starting with the composition, then mixing colours and building up the brush strokes. It’s the same with wine, with the latter being how you can approach building the right flavour profile. There is a real artistry to it.
What has been especially exciting for you at Dandelion and Heirloom in recent years?
Cool-climate wines are becoming quite popular in Australia, and so Adelaide Hills is now the fastest-growing wine region in terms of sales in the country. That’s so exciting because we’ve always loved it. I can’t seem to make enough Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir and Chardonnay right now to satisfy our markets, which is wonderful to see because the region is very small.
Within that space, clonal differences between Pinot Noir and Chardonnay have also become really exciting. It's fun to learn more about clonal variation as more growers begin working with different clones. We are discovering which are best suited to different sites. The Adelaide Hills is incredibly diverse in terms of its microclimates. It's one of the hardest wine regions to work in, full stop - even harder than Eden Valley - because every slope differs from the next. So, every clone you can grow on each slope will express itself differently from the next. It’s so complicated. It’s going to be decades before we can perfect that region. I'm excited to be part of that, though, because there are just so many good wines now coming out of the Adelaide Hills.
In McLaren Vale, we are finding that the region is well suited to Mediterranean varieties. So, we now have a two-hectare Touriga Nacional vineyard in Blewitt Springs, which I love so much. It’s one of my favourite vineyards we work with in that area, which is a cooler part of McLaren Vale. The culture, food, and climate in McLaren Vale are also Mediterranean, so it all makes a lot of sense. Whereas in the Adelaide Hills, everything is more Burgundian, so that’s often the winemaking approach taken there.
We’ve also recently moved into our own winery, which we purchased about 12 months ago. It’s a little nerve-wracking, but it’s wonderful. I am one of those winemakers who sees all the tanks and fittings in a winery as treasure, so it’s exciting to have new equipment to work with. It gives us much more flexibility as well. If we need an extra day for fermentation or an extra day to process fruit, we can just go ahead with it. We always owned our own tanks and barrels but never the walls. Now, we can do whatever we want with the space. Plus, it’s just nine minutes from home. It’s wonderful!
Aside from the site, is there anything else that influences your winemaking?
I’ve thought a lot about the wine-drinking culture in Australia, and I suppose it’s quite similar to in the UK. People tend to drink wine socially, and more often than not, it’s with food. So, making wines that work well with food is also important. Those are wines that are more medium-bodied with beautiful acidity and length, defined by fresh fruit. Thankfully, that’s also the kind of wine I enjoy making and a style that best expresses a site. So, at our cellar door in McLaren Vale, we always serve food with a tasting to really get that experience, too.
I love wine. It’s so disappointing to hear how younger people, and consumers in general, really, aren’t enjoying wine as much as before. It’s disappointing that wine is being combined together with ‘big alcohol’ when the reality is that very few people are going out drinking to get drunk on wine. Wine is such an intelligent drink that we enjoy around a table with friends and good conversation. It’s an entirely different experience from so many other kinds of alcohol, but it gets lumped together with them. We are on the brink of losing such an intelligent drinking culture, which is really sad.
The trend to drinking less in the younger generations is certainly one of the industry's biggest challenges. Our Independent Off-Trade Report in 2024 reflected that, but it also gave us a bit of hope in how the UK trade is slowly but surely getting consumers to focus on quality over quantity. That seems to be the best route to sustainable growth: focussing on pulling up the average bottle spend and engaging consumers with drinking less but better wine.
Absolutely, and that’s the space that we work in with Dandelion and also with Heirloom: making more premium wines so that people can get more for their money. Drink less, but drink better, as you say. We’re seeing that in Australia as well. The average spend has gone up, and people are drinking really amazing wines.
Being a curious drinker is also important. In America, for example, you’re sort of told that Napa Cabernet is the best, and that’s what you should be drinking, even if you don’t like it. Ultimately, as Zar often says, the best wine is the one you like. People need to be encouraged to experiment, to discover what they enjoy, and to do that in a fun environment. Making wine accessible in how it’s sold ties in with this. More than ever, making wines with a sense of place and engaging the consumer with them is crucial.