OUR STORY

IT BEGINS AS IT ALWAYS HAS, WITH THE LAND /

It started with Even Keel. Twenty years ago, Sam Coverdale was already making wine — travelling, learning, working his way through the cellars of Australia and the vineyards of Spain, Italy and France, developing a very clear sense of the wines he wanted to make and the regions that could make them. Even Keel was born from that — a label built on cool-climate conviction, long before it had a home. Twenty years on, it is still the truest expression of where this began.

Then came the land. Eighteen months later, Sam and his wife Emma Phillips bought a piece of land on the Mornington Peninsula. The moment they arrived, Polperro followed — a second label, yes, but really something more personal. A name for the wines that would come directly from this place, this soil, these specific sites they were now beginning to understand. They didn’t plan a destination. They planted vines and began to listen.

A few years later, the cellar door opened. Then the restaurant. Not as ambition, but as the natural unfolding of people who had found their place in the world and wanted to share it more broadly.

Our vineyards are farmed organically and regeneratively, with our home site, Talland Hill, certified organic and biodynamic. This is not a philosophy we speak about lightly. It is a long-term commitment to the health of the land, to soil, to vine, and to the future of what we are building here. You spend enough years watching soil come back to life, watching vine health move from fragile to fierce, and you stop thinking of farming as a practice. It becomes a conversation. A long, slow, honest one.

OUR CRAFT /

Great wine is made on the vine.

Each site is understood individually, over years. Its soil, its aspect, its rhythm. In the winery, our role is to guide rather than shape, allowing each vineyard to speak clearly of place and season. The moment each parcel of fruit arrives, it is an opportunity to truly respect the work of nature — to do as little as possible, promoting character and balance, while never masking or interfering through excessive additions or filtration.

We work with a small handful of Burgundian cooperages — not out of habit, but out of belief that the vessel, like the vineyard, shapes what it holds.

TWO LABELS, ONE INTENTION /

Even Keel

Est. 2006 · Australia’s cool-climate regions

Where it started. A label built on conviction before it had a home. A broader exploration celebrating the individual strengths of Australia’s wine regions — working with our own vineyards, complemented by trusted growers across Mornington, Heathcote, Tumbarumba, Canberra and Tasmania. Each place chosen for what it alone can offer — different soils, different skies, the same deep respect for what the land and climate are trying to tell us.

Polperro

Est. 2009 · Estate-grown · Single Vineyard

Estate-grown expressions of unique sites on the Mornington Peninsula. Each wine speaks honestly of the specific piece of land from which it comes, understood through years of patient observation. Nothing added. Nothing taken away that shouldn’t be.

Both are family-owned. Both are made by hand. Both begin with someone standing in a vineyard, paying attention.

WHAT BEGAN AS A VINEYARD BECAME SOMETHING MORE /

Not by design, but by deepening. So we built around it, carefully — not to expand, but to deepen the experience of what already existed. The dining room, cellar door and Farmhouse were each designed in collaboration with Hecker Guthrie — a shared vision between Emma and one of Australia’s most considered design studios. Each one a continuation of the same idea — that care, when it runs deep enough, becomes a place you can feel.

Our dining is an extension of the vineyard — guided by season, shaped by what is growing and ready. Much of our produce is grown on Polperro Farm, a small-scale, certified organic, biodynamic farm that sits just beyond the vines. Farmer and chef plan months, often a year, in advance, working side by side to bring each season to life.

Vineyard Dining

Four consecutive Chef’s Hats · The Age Good Food Guide

Our flagship experience — a dining room that grows from the land it sits on. The menu is shaped by Polperro Farm and the season, with nothing forced and everything earned. Recognised four consecutive years with a Chef’s Hat in The Age Good Food Guide — not as a destination in itself, but as a reflection of a deeper way of working.

The Cellar Door

The home of our wine · Up to ten guests

Embedded into the hillside, kept cool by the earth above — the way wine has always asked to be kept, long before anyone thought to ask. Walls of wine. Low light. A solid stone table at its centre. Everyone around it. No one behind it. The vintages rest around you, and the room rests with them. Ten guests at a time, no more. The hour softens, and you soften with it. What unfolds is less a tasting than a conversation — with the place, with the season, with the people who grew and made the wines, and with whatever each bottle has carried from the vineyard into the room. Stories that would never find a label. Questions answered without hurry. Something you feel before you find the words for. Unhurried. Intimate. Quietly unlike anywhere else.

The Lawn

Open Air · Grazing · Fire Pits

The heartbeat of the property. Wine tasted where it was made, food drawn from the farm, the vineyard all around you. The Lawn is where the Polperro experience is most open — unhurried, generous, and honest about what this place is and where everything on the table comes from. As the season turns, the fire pits are lit and the gathering moves to the deck. The feeling never changes.

The Villas

Couples · Talland Hill Vineyard

Four private villas nestled among the vines on our Talland Hill vineyard, forty metres from the dining room. Open fire, spa, private deck over the vineyard. Designed for couples, and for the particular pleasure of stumbling home from a long lunch through your own private piece of the Peninsula. Booked out most weekends of the year — and entirely understandably.

The Farmhouse

Private Hire · Donaldsons Road

A 1950s home reimagined by Hecker Guthrie and Emma, sitting high on our Donaldsons Road vineyard with Western Port water views across the vines. Three bedrooms, a European garden, a mystical pine forest at its back, and a little path through the vineyard that leads you quietly back to Polperro. Private hire only — for those who want to cook, drink, explore, and settle slowly into the Peninsula for a few days. The kind of place that makes leaving feel unreasonable.

Many Little

Bar & Dining · Red Hill Village

Born in 2018 as a local bar and dining room in the heart of Red Hill village. In late 2025, we passed Many Little to our long-time Executive Chef and dear friend, Gayan Pieris — who had led the kitchen from the beginning and made it his own. Gayan remains Creative Director at Polperro, and the farm and wines continue to sit at the heart of the Many Little program. The spirit that built it remains unchanged.

This is what luxury means to us — not excess, but care. Not scale, but detail. Not something applied, but something deeply embedded in how we work.

In the temperature of the barrel room. In the gap between vine rows where the cover crops grow wild. In the farmer and the chef planning a menu around something that hasn’t been planted yet.

For us, luxury has never been about more. It’s about truer.

AND THEN THERE IS HUT /

Hut · Yoga & Wellness

Ten years ago, long before wellness became a word the world couldn’t stop using, we built a space for it. Not as an amenity, not as an afterthought, but as a genuine act of belief — that the people who come here, and the community that calls this place home, deserve somewhere to land fully. To breathe. To come back to themselves.

Hut Wellness has grown into one of the most quietly celebrated boutique wellness destinations in the country. Those who know it, know it. A space of rare beauty and rare intention, designed for the unhurried work of healing and restoration. It draws guests who build their time on the Peninsula around it — and a beloved local community who have made it part of the rhythm of their lives, season after season, year after year.

Each January, as summer peaks, Hut brings its practice to the Polperro vineyard — Yoga in the Vines, a series held on the lawn among the vines. Two worlds, one intention.

A BOUTIQUE BUILT ON THE SAME BELIEF /

Amelie & Frank’s

What runs through Amelie & Frank’s is the same thing that runs through everything in the Polperro world — an instinct that cannot be taught or replicated. Emma brings to every piece she selects the same deep belief that shapes every wine Sam makes: that only what is truly right deserves a place, that craft and integrity should do all the heavy lifting, that the edit itself is the experience.

Fashion, fragrance, home. Two minutes from the vineyard, and a world away from anywhere else. A boutique that people travel for. Not easily found elsewhere.

Red Hill

The Red Hill community is something we have never quite encountered anywhere else. There is a quality to it — in the people, the makers, the families, the land-keepers — that is genuinely rare. Precious, even. And over nearly two decades, contributing to that community, nurturing it, being part of what makes it extraordinary, has become one of the things we are most proud of.

The intention

Polperro has grown into a collection of experiences. But it remains a continuous idea.

Across everything we do, the intention is the same — to create something that feels connected. To the land, to the seasons, and to the people who spend time here. A belief in craft. A respect for the land. And a commitment to building something that will last well beyond us.

We are still learning. Still refining. Still guided by the seasons. And always, we come back to the vineyard. The land that started everything. The place that demands patience, rewards restraint, and never gives the same answer twice.