Billboards punctuate the Maroondah Highway as it barrels east of Melbourne through the pastoral undulations of the Yarra Valley. They are a roll call of the big-name vineyards in one of Australia’s most important grape-growing regions: Hubert Estate, Chandon Australia, Oakridge, Tarra-Warra Estate. Only the keenest-eyed drivers would notice a sign the size of a number plate on a gate in the town of Coldstream with Yeringberg painted on it in quiet black font. This, though, is one of Australia’s oldest wineries. Sandra de Pury, 62, the fourth generation of her family to farm this site, strides out to meet me as I park near the 162-year-old winery. Her appearance identifies her as a winemaker at the end of vintage: slightly frazzled hair, hands stained with grape juice and the hard graft of picking and pressing 12 hours a day, seven days a week for the past month. We head over to the weatherboard, Amish barn-style building – currently being renovated under the exacting gaze of the National Trust – and into the cellar. Thirty-five tonnes of grapes, enough to make about 1750 cases, have been harvested, the wine stored in barrels that line the subterranean stone walls. De Pury’s great-grandfather, Baron Frédéric Guillaume de Pury, who emigrated from Switzerland in 1852, quarried this stone from an adjacent hill on which the vines that produced the current vintage now grow. Genetic pull drew de Pury back here after avoiding the family legacy and busying herself for years as a chef and management consultant. She joined her brother, David, 60, full-time on the property in 2008. Pushing to produce wines even better than their great-grandfather and father, Guillaume, before them, they have just won The Real Review Vigneron of the Year award. This new category lauds excellence by a vigneron – in this case the partnership between Sandra, who makes the wine, and David, with a PhD in plant physiology, who manages the vines. “The de Purys are quiet people who fly under the radar,” says judge Huon Hooke. “They are Swiss nobility but also salt of the earth. It is their lack of ego which sets them apart. Neither of them mess too much with the grapes, they simply guide them into becoming great wine.” Yeringberg neither sends out media releases nor mounts social mediacampaigns. Intermittent emails are dispatched to announce a new batch of wine for sale, sometimes with the bonus of a leg of Yeringberg lamb (they graze sheep and cattle on the property). “There is no other winery I can think of which sells wine and meat together,” Hooke says. “I imagine it would be pretty great drinking their cabernet with a roast leg of their lamb.”