It started with an international romance, found a beautiful home in the Adelaide Hills and now the fruits of a wine-fuelled love story have taken on a globe-trotting life of their own.
The subject of this expansive drama is a portfolio of Adelaide Hills and Langhorne Creek wines that have found their way into the pulsating world of Euro electronic dance music.
While our vines are turning past their autumn hues and falling into winter, a Belgian-based festival phenomenon known as Tomorrowland is in full swing in Europe and South America, where hundreds of thousands of enthused revellers party for days to non-stop music on multiple stages and surrounding bars and top-class restaurants.
The main characters in the story are Wayne and Myrian Keoghan, the couple behind the thriving Anvers vineyards and cellar door on Razorback Road, east of Kangarilla, just inside the western border of the Adelaide Hills wine region.
The backdrop for this saga is an inspiring Hills landscape, glorious gum trees dotting rolling hills and vales on the southern slopes of Mt Bold Reservoir, the towers of Mt Lofty on the far north-eastern horizon.
It is here, in and around a former dairy milking shed, that Wayne and Myriam have created Anvers’ modernist mix of stone and glass cellar door and restaurant, wedding and function centre. It has contemporary menus and a smart set of classic Hills varieties with emerging new styles coming into play to keep visitors on their tasting toes.
Three of those wines, a Chardonnay, Shiraz and Rosé, have been made specifically as a signature trio labelled “Acta Non Verba”, created in collaboration with the directors of the hyper-successful Tomorrowland team. The phrase translates to “one act holds a million words”, Wayne says, which he reckons describes how both enterprises approach life and business.
The wines have been at the Tomorrowland festivals since 2023, but have only just been released in Australia. While aficionados will appreciate the elite Hills style of the wines and the high-end bottle design, the story of their creation is like an episode out of an Ancestry documentary.
Wayne and Myriam met in her home city of Antwerp – the French translation being Anvers. She followed him to Australia, where he was working in Brisbane, before being transferred with his work to Adelaide. Eventually they found their dream piece of land on Razorback Road and were convinced by mates to plant, in 1998, the first of what has become a prized vineyard, the main source of their set of wines made at the Torresan-owned winery facility at Woodside by Mylor-based, Master of Wine and international winemaker Kym Milne.
The reason that the Hills wines are attractive in Belgium, and also in the French parts of Canada, are because the wines – reds and whites – have a familiar style
Just three years after they had made their first wine, Myriam and Wayne acquired, through family connections, a fledgling Belgian distributor, Artevino, which has since taken on a large proportion of the Anvers portfolio, the wines impressing northern hemisphere consumers with their European-style elegance and softness, particularly in the reds.
Through their Belgian business team, the Keoghans met with Tomorrowland’s directors and, after an Anvers Shiraz impressed them and a crew of wine experts for a listing in a new high-end restaurant venture they were starting, the festival bosses also decided to create a signature set for their dance music events. The three wines are now across all outlets in the festival program, as well as in many regular restaurants and bars.
For Myriam, building strong links with her Belgian homeland has given extra impetus to the project.
“It’s really nice to see it all come together,” Myriam says. “There’s such a strong connection with Tomorrowland, with Belgium and with the name of our wine – it’s an Australian wine with a Belgian name and they find that quite strange sometimes.
“One of the guys is from close to where I was brought up and so you have that connection as well – do you remember this and do you remember that? It does make it so close,” she says.
Myriam laughs a little at the suggestion she’s an unofficial ambassador for the Adelaide Hills when she visits her hometown and she and Wayne showcase their wines.
“Every time I go, I’m always saying that Australia has adopted me and I’m so happy, because Australia is a beautiful country. I love Adelaide, too. It’s a beautiful city. And the Hills. We have a lot to offer.”
And when she sees a bottle of Anvers wine in a Belgian bar or a restaurant?
“It’s a little weird and also really nice to see,” Myriam remarks. “It’s like, ‘oh, that’s mine’, and especially now with the Acta Non Verba, when we go back to Antwerp and see it in restaurants there, I know I’ll be thinking ‘oh my God, that’s pretty special – we’ve created that’.”
She recalls her brother was doing a wine course in Belgium and the only Australian Shiraz they tasted in the lessons was Anvers.
“He was blown away, exclaiming to everyone around him that it was his sister’s wine, impressed that it was their choice of Australia’s best known red variety.
“It made it clear to me how important it was for the Adelaide Hills to know that even in those environments, they choose our region over all the others.”
The reason that the Hills wines are attractive in Belgium, and also in the French parts of Canada, are because the wines – reds and whites – have a familiar style, Wayne notes.
“They’ve got an elegance and silkiness to them because of the coolness of the Hills region,” he says.
“Every region has its strengths, its character. We’re not Barossa, we’re not McLaren Vale. We can still make good medium – to full-bodied reds, but what they really love is that our wines are not too overdone.
“They’re not big fruit bombs, because they’re not used to that.
“They relate to the wines because they are more European in style.”
