In 1998, Edourd and Julie Peter came to Adelaide to visit Julie's parents and the four got together again. At dinner in the Aldgate Pump Hotel, Edourd asked Reid if he had thought any more about a vineyard and winery. "Actually, I think about it all the time," Reid replied. How much? This time Reid had a more realistic figure. "Ed said: 'I think we can come to that'."

"A few weeks later we had lunch at Vintners up here. He outlined his proposal and how much he was prepared to put on the table and off we went.

"There were not too many restrictions on what he expected He wanted excellent wine and ultimately I think he wanted it in Australia, but I had to go through the process of checking everywhere just to make sure we were doing the right thing.

"We looked everywhere. We looked at the Napa Valley. We looked in the south of France. We looked in Marlborough in New Zealand and we looked at the best regions in Australia."

Then chance entered again. Reid first saw fruit from Kaesler's in 1997 when Toby Heuppauff sent it to Cellarmaster under an arrangement for some to go back to be sold under a Kaesler label. The fruit impressed him.

In 1998, he was so overwhelmed by the intensity of the old vine Shiraz that he made a special batch he called "Old Bastard". It was up there in the Grange and Hill of Grace class, but with its own distinctions, its own secrets.

Clearly, here was his vineyard, but was it for sale? By sheer chance again, it was.
Edourd Peter and his colleagues - an American, a Swiss and a German - with Reid made the purchase from Toby Heuppauff in November 1999.

But, with less than 30 acres, it was not big enough to justify building a winery. They not only needed more land, to meet their ambitions, they needed top grape-growing land. This in the tightly and mainly family held Barossa Valley was a formidable task.

Chance came again. Barry Matthew, the man who owned the property next door, decided to sell out and retire. Not only was this some of the best land in the valley and producing sumptuous wine grapes, it brought together 60 of the original Kaesler acres from 1893.