If you’ve followed Fighting Gully Road for a while, you’ll know the wines don’t exist in isolation, they’re very much a product of Mark Walpole’s way of seeing vineyards.
Raised in North East Victoria, with roots in Whorouly, Mark’s connection to this part of the world runs well beyond Fighting Gully Road. The understanding of site, season, and variability that shows up in the wines was shaped long before the vineyard was planted.
His path into wine began with formal studies in wine science, but it was the decades that followed, spent in vineyards across Victoria, that defined his approach. Early roles in both vineyard management and consultancy exposed him to a wide range of sites, varieties, and growing conditions, building a depth of practical knowledge that continues to inform his work today.
Over time, Mark became one of Australia’s most respected viticulturists, advising growers and producers across multiple regions. His contribution to the industry has been recognised many times, but most recently when he was named 2024 Viticulturist of the Year by Halliday Wine Companion a reflection of both his technical expertise and long-standing influence on vineyard practices in Australia.
At the same time, Fighting Gully Road has remained a constant focus – established in the late 1990s and steadily refined ever since. Under Mark’s guidance, the vineyard has evolved from its early Bordeaux plantings toward varieties better suited to the site, including Sangiovese, Tempranillo, and Verdicchio, now central to the range and widely regarded as benchmarks in their categories. Also now with his new vineyard up in Stanley – Europa Vineyard, first planted in 2024. Europa been planted primarily to chardonnay, on red Dermosol soils, which are free-draining and perfect for white varieties on a south-east facing slope. Europa is his highest vineyard, with an elevation of between 700-750m above sea level; and is the site for his newly imported variety – Petit Arvine, which is found at home in the Aosta valley in north-west Italy and over the border in Switzerland.
Fighting Gully Road has a practical confidence to it. No chasing trends, no heavy hand in the winery—just a long-term view of what his sites can do, and a steady refinement of how to get there. If you’ve been drinking the wines over the years, you’ve seen that thinking play out. Not in dramatic shifts, but in incremental changes, more clarity, more precision, a stronger sense of place with each vintage.
It’s the result of a lifetime spent in and around vineyards, most of it not far from where it all began.