Introducing Circulus

Good News All Round

The circle of life is a fascinating thing, and this thoroughly holistic vigneron will bring renewed vigour to your love of wine. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that we welcome the wines of Circulus to the CellarHand portfolio.

John White’s wines make sense. This windswept maritime vineyard is in their DNA. They crest with cool, pretty tones, pitch with wild, savoury undertow and pulse with insistence, unfurling just-so on a finish that is more aptly an entreaty to go back to the start. These are wines that John and his wife, Kim, love to drink. “It’s a trite line,” he says, “but she’s my muse in this.”

We can’t argue; the internal logic is impeccable, and so is the delivery.

Such is the sense of cohesion here that to understand the name is to understand Circulus. This is a full-circle project for a man who grew up among the vineyards of the Adelaide Hills. His father was a member of the Beefsteak and Burgundy Club, and as a kid, he’d run around at cellar doors while his parents tasted wine in the Barossa, Clare and McLaren Vale. He and his brother collected wine labels to swap with mates like footy cards.

It led John to enrol at Roseworthy to study oenology, but he swerved off that path towards a career that looked more sustainable. During a rewarding 30-year stint in finance, his passion simmered beneath the surface as a deepening appreciation of what it took, both practically and philosophically, to grow great wines.

Then came the fateful cancer diagnosis that took him back to the beginning. Living back on Kim’s Surf Coast home turf, a reawakening of that initial dream led them to purchase Coatsworth Farm on the Bellarine Peninsula in 2021.

The farm is encircled by water. Three kilometres north and east is Port Phillip Bay, 10 kilometres west is Corio Bay, and five kilometres from here, you have the Southern Ocean crashing into Victoria’s Pinot Coast. Intense, energetic wines encapsulate this environment of rain-shadowed vines in low-nutrient soils, freshened and flustered by constant offshore breezes.

The third ring of the story is the virtuous circle of regenerative farming. The estate is on its way to becoming Carbon Neutral Certified by Climate Active. John and Kim focus their initiatives on energy efficiency, limiting water use, biodiversity expansion, weed and pest management and closing the loop on materials and resources that flow in and out of the business. Custom organic compost, no-till, multi-species cover crops, integrated livestock grazing and biodiversity buffers are all in place to improve the site’s health while adding dimensionality and vitality to the glass.

These wines already enjoy an excellent reputation among those in the know, and John is unequivocally the kind of wine-lover that CellarHand and our extended family in the trade love to have a thoughtful drink with. We very much look forward to spreading the love and expanding Circulus’s circle of friends ever outward.