Andrew Marks

Coming Up

At Gembrook Hill in the Upper Yarra Valley, Australia, the work is shaped by a yearly effort toward wines that are as exacting as the site allows, without chasing polish for its own sake. Andrew Marks sits inside that discipline, where the point is not to claim perfection but to keep testing the limits of it. The result is a practice that reads as precise, grounded in tradition, and willing to adjust to what the season gives.

Where They Are Now

At University of Adelaide, Andrew Marks laid in the formal base for a career that moves across more than one field without losing focus. Today he works as winemaker of Gembrook Hill, steers his own wine label, The Wanderer, and makes MGC (Melbourne Gin Company) gins of Melbourne Gin Company. The span of that work suggests a maker comfortable with both vineyard and still, and with the different forms of attention each demands. In the Upper Yarra Valley, the winemaking at Gembrook Hill is centered on elegant, refined cool-climate Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, sparkling wine, and Syrah. Each wine is built within a frame that favors clarity, balance, and restraint. Marks’s approach keeps the vineyard and season in view, with the final shape of the wine allowed to settle rather than be pushed into place. The Wanderer carries that same directness into his own label. The Wanderer Upper Yarra Pinot Noir is a single-vineyard wine from Yellingbo in the Upper Yarra Valley, and it reads as a specific account of site rather than a broad regional statement.

Signature

Andrew's signature wines include IJM, The Wanderer Upper Yarra Pinot Noir 2025, El Wanderer, and MGC Gin. Together, they sketch the breadth of his practice: wines that carry family, place, and craft in different registers, alongside a gin that extends his palate into another form.

In Their Words “As a winemaker, every year we are striving to make the perfect wine. And even though we all know that the perfect wine doesn’t exist it doesn’t stop us from trying!”

Honors

IJM carries a deeper familial resonance as well. Drawn from three of the oldest rows on the property and a few of the youngest vines, it connects generations through plant material: old rows, young vines, a father’s initials, and a son’s hand in the cellar. The wine becomes more than a label or a blend; it becomes a way of holding memory in something tangible, rooted in the vineyard’s physical inheritance. That is also what gives IJM its force within Marks’s work. Rather than treating memory as something abstract or sentimental, it locates it in the material language of vines, rows, and blending decisions. In that sense, it clarifies the scale at which he often works: not grand gestures, but finely tuned acts of composition, where place and lineage are allowed to speak in the same breath.