The sisterly bond behind Limestone Coast wine label
Two sisters with eight children between them; Jane Richards and Claire Davies share a wine label and plenty of laughs along the way.
Jane Richards and Claire Davies are laughing out loud, like only sisters can do. With themselves. At themselves. No secrets here.
They’re on their way to one of the many capital city Good Food and Wine Shows where they showcase their Eight At The Gate wines, realising it’s been close to 25 years since they put down roots in their Wrattonbully vineyard and began a whole new journey for both their families in the dynamic, sometimes crazy world of grapes and wine.
Talk about jumping into the deep end, Jane recalls.
“Our only wine experience together before then was drinking it,” she smiles. They burst out laughing again. All too knowingly. Which seems pretty natural when it comes to the kind of ups and downs that any family, especially one in business together, eventually has to navigate.
The sisters’ journey revolving around their beloved vineyard began at the turn of the century when a moment in time required some true family grit. Jane’s personal life, then based in America’s Silicon Valley in IT land, had been sent spinning. She realised it was time to return to Australia with her children.
She and Claire had been born and raised in Bordertown, two of five kids, their dad an irrigation man working all over the South East’s wine regions, while also managing a family farm. They attended school in Adelaide, then Claire went on to study wine science and head down the viticulture path. Jane went into the corporate sphere.
“We’ve always been exposed to country life, so we’d been running around vineyards when we were little, helping dad roll out dripper wires and tubes,” Jane recalls.
Serendipitously, a property Claire had helped develop from grazing land into vineyard in 1994 came onto the market in the early 2000s, even though they weren’t specifically looking around the district where they had grown up.
“I thought, I know that place. I know it’s good. I know the soils and the infrastructure, and with Dad’s expertise, we knew it had access to good, clean underground water,” Claire says.
“And when it came to looking at different regions that were sound for viticulture, Wrattonbully ticked lots of boxes.”
With Claire starting a family, both sisters figured their work wasn’t exactly friendly to family life. Their dad was heading towards retirement as well. It all seemed right time, right place. Claire’s skill set when it came to viticultural matters fitted. Jane’s business experience was essential.
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“Initially we bought the vineyard to just grow grapes. We never planned to have a wine label – that was never on the horizon,” Jane says.
“It was a 40-hectare vineyard at the time and 500 acres of land, so it was a mixed farm for us as well. We were running cattle, at first, but they got too big and scary, so we moved to sheep.
“We just did it together. It gave us the opportunity to continue working while raising our families,” Jane recalls.
“We didn’t have a plan to work quite closely, but it was, well, okay, this has happened, and our family has always been like this. It doesn’t matter who it is that needs help, because there have been times when all of my siblings have needed help through various things, and everybody just downs tools and does what they have to.”
Over time that has included everyone, from Mum, Dad, Claire’s husband Tom on weekends, while working full-time with larger wine companies, and eventually their children, all eight of them, four apiece.
Notice that number: eight.
After many years of growing and selling grapes to other producers, small and large, and watching the way that business was being eroded by changing corporate behaviours, the sisters Jane and Claire realised that they needed to develop their own brand and make their own wine. They started with the red varieties they grew, cabernet and shiraz, and then expanded into their whites, chardonnay and pinot gris.
“We knew we could make some pretty good booze, so after we started, we then came up with a name that was a bit like a calling card, sort of proving that we could do it,” Claire says.
For themselves. And, of course, family.
Jane remembers there were so many different combinations and permutations, but they wanted their name to tell the story that they were not a corporate.
“We wanted to somehow express that we were two sisters with eight kids between us,” Jane says.
They played around with the numbers. They spelled out their letters. They shied away from using sisters in the name because there were many other brands in the same space. And eventually a friend remarked that he was always seeing photos of all the family, eight kids, at the front gate.
And there you have it, telling their story exactly how it was.
“When it came time to prune, or train the vines, and all the vineyard jobs were on, we’d all get out there and help, and the kids would be left to free range,” Jane recalls.
“Invariably, they would end up on the top of a fence or a gate or a tractor or a motorbike. They were a pack, always eight of them because they are close in age (now 25 to 18) and good buddies, and the eight of them just would get into trouble doing it all while we were working.
“They were a real gang of country kids, you know, so running around the bush, having a good time, probably, on their motorbikes as soon as they were on trainer wheels, all that sort of stuff.”
As the eight have grown, they’ve all worked in and around the business doing different things, from vintage work to sales help, but their mums have encouraged them to go out and do what they want study and career wise.
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“They’re all welcome here, and obviously we’d have to work out how that would happen,” Jane says. “But they’re all doing different things. We’ve got it all covered – we’ve got electricians, we’ve got psychologists, we’ve got occupational therapists, teachers, environmental science, agriculture business.”
Meanwhile, back on the farm in Wrattonbully, Jane and Claire keep their business turning over. Claire grows the grapes and makes the wine, having taken over from their original winemaker Peter Douglas, who has retired but still is on the end of the phone when needed. Jane does the rest in terms of the business, the sales, exports, packaging, marketing, website and so on.
“We stay in our lanes pretty much and manage to make it work because neither of us tries to tell the other what to do,” Jane says.
There’s that laughing again, Claire this time: “I wouldn’t be able to do an Instagram reel.”
With the help of another local, sparkling wine specialist Peta Baverstock, the sisters started a traditional method sparkling wine in 2022, based around their much-loved chardonnay fruit. At the time they didn’t have a name for it, but between them they concocted a wonderful tribute to their mum and secretly labelled it after her, the Jillian Pearl Sparkling Blanc de Blanc 2022.
“We thought we’d really like to dedicate it to Mum because it would have been be impossible for us to do what we’ve been able to do without her support,” Jane says.
“When the kids were little, Claire and I’d be out in the vineyard, and she’d be inside entertaining children or cooking or just whatever needed to be done.
“And for me as a single mum of four, she’s stepped up all over the place for me in so many ways.
“We really wanted to do it as a tribute to her, and we got a gold medal and 95/100 at the Limestone Coast Wine Show.”
A local reporter rang them wanting to write about it, but it hadn’t been released yet, as it was still a secret. They soon presented it to her at Christmas, which of course led to many tears.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mum that emotional,” Jane says. “Actually, she really was shocked because we wrote some nice things on the back of the label as well. The good thing is she loves the wine and takes it out to all her friends.”
Jillian is still never too far from their daily duties, the sisters say, and sets a gold standard in terms of dedicated family love.
“She’s 84 and still working every day – just not getting paid for it,” Jane says. “And Dad retired from his full-time job at 80. I guess it’s not in our DNA to think about retiring yet either.”
There’s still plenty to do with the business, they say, having moved out of solely being grape farmers to now making and selling their own Eight at the Gate wines, which consumes about 35 per cent of the vineyard’s production, the rest still sold on. The long-term plan is to transition to 100 per cent own label, as they continue to develop their markets, domestically and overseas.
And then there are the sheep, for which Claire has a real soft spot.
“Actually, I really like the sheep, and the livestock side of things. They keep me grounded because they don’t talk!” Claire says. And, again, they laugh.
“Yep, I guess that means we’re not old enough to even begin thinking about giving it up, then.”
This article first appeared in the December 2025 issue of SALIFE magazine.
