A famous McLaren Vale winery now boasts Italian magic, writes Tony Love

The Advertiser – Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Today we’ll speak only Italian.  The words, a wicked smile, and a jab in the ribs come from prominent Italian businessman Don Totino, who owns the food-and-wine distribution company Festival City. Don also owns a wine company, Totino, based in the Adelaide Hills, and in the past two years he has joined three other southern Italian-Australian business identities in breathing life back into Haselgrove, set in the midriff of the McLaren Vale wine region.

The Haselgrove family brand has a history stretching back a century, but in the past two decades it struggled and found itself taken over by Bankwest in 2002, until early 2008. Grasping the potential of the name, Don and his colleagues-fellow Calabrians Don Luca, Tony Carrocci and Campobasso-reared Steve Maglieri-joined forces to rebuild the new Haselgrove into a successful wine company which highlights its Italian personality on its labels but remains securely attached to traditional varieties and blends.

While winemaker Greg Clack works with sauvignon blanc, simillon and chardonnay in his white spectrum, the classic shiraz, cabernet and merlot in reds, the new Haselgrove range includes the titles Primo Taglio (First Cut), Bella Vigna (Beautiful Vineyard) and the flagship IL Padrone (The Boss) shiraz in table and sparkling styles. No sangiovese. No nebbiolo. No vermentino.Good, straight, mod-Oz varieties that begin in a very smart $9-$12 value range, packaged “H” by Haselgrove.

Step up about $5 into the Primo Taglio label and the shiraz outguns a sauvignon/semillon combo. What they do show also is the commitment from Haselgrove general manager Gordon Grant to focus on whites from the Adelaide Hills and reds from McLaren Vale. “If we can’t make a really, really good bottle of McLaren Vale shiraz for $25, then there’s something wrong,” Gordon  says.

The camaraderie between the quartet is endearing, and their appreciation of wine as a part of daily life is heartening.
Two of the men are brothers-in-law: Don Totino and Don Luca both coming from the same Calabrian village. Both are now successful businessmen, with their fingers in the wine business as well as other successful venturs. Don Luca is in commercial and industrial property and building supplies, as well as his Hills-based Totino label.Tony Carrocci, another post-war Calabrian immigrant, is in commercial, industrial and residential projects with his firm Build Tech Group.

Perhaps the most familiar wine figure is Steve Maglieri, from near Naples, who in 1977 started Maglieri Wines. He has been named McLaren Vale Bushing King twice for making the regions’s wine of the year, then sold to Beringer Blass in 1998. He retained huge swather of vineyard, before beggining over again in 2002 with Serafino Wines in the old McLarens on the Lake complex, expanding that into an impressive local production centre.

How the four work their family, business and wine matrixes is anyone’s guess, but their love of soccer, food and wine, and their cultural family values, are binding elements.And they can never get away from the grape. “Wine is part of our everyday lives,” Don Totino says. “It’s an essential part of social relaxation.”

His father, at 93, still helped work up a batch of homemade wine last year and the boys are plannin to let him ferment some more juice this vintage-just like they all did in Calabria.”My father’s wine is, how you might say, horrible,” Don Totino says. “But he still drinks it. “On his 80th birthday, the lads took dad bottles of Grange and Dom Perignon. But he rejected them. “You can drink this rubbish – I’ll drink my own wine” he said.  Being the boss, the boys bowed to his wishes. “Of course we made him happy,” Don Totino recalls. “We simply drank the Grange ourselves.”