MEET BEN MURRAY
WHO IS BEN MURRAY?
In truth, Ben Murray is not one person, but two very passionate wine-lovers.
Like all great partnerships, it started with a common interest. For Daniel Benjamin Eggleton and Craig Murray Thompson, that interest happened to be a good drop of wine.
They dreamed of one day crafting premium small-batch wines made with elegance and texture, and with layers of stories and experience encased within the bottle.
Ben Murray became a second life; a return home, after being out in the world alone, to do it their own way.
ABOUT
DAN
Daniel “Ben” Eggleton is the winemaker, the one pair of hands that nurtures the wine from start to finish.
He has over 25 Australian vintages under his belt, from large acclaimed companies to his own boutique wineries, as well as a vintage in Germany and decades of work in the wine industry in the USA and France.
Dan is focussed on creating wines that taste of their place, that offer value and generosity,
and maintain the Barossa Valley’s reputation for premium quality. Making (and drinking!) a quality wine doesn’t have to be expensive, fancy or full of bells and whistles. Tending the land in harmony with the environment and letting the grapes speak for themselves is all it should take to create a characterful wine.
ABOUT
CRAIG
Craig “Murray” Thompson says the wine bug bit him at an early age. While he constantly moved about as a child, his first and most vivid memories are of living in Lyndoch, in the Barossa Valley.
Over the subsequent years, while he worked his day job in corporate Australia, Craig lived wine. He collected wine, drank wine, read about wine, wrote about wine, and eventually left his job in finance to immerse himself in the myriad wine regions of Italy and import boutique Italian wines into Australia.
Craig’s work in the extraordinarily diverse wine landscape of Italy has allowed him to work with winemakers, growers and vignerons from all walks of life – from the steadfastly traditional, to the wildly unconventional – all of the knowledge of whom he has brought back home to his work with Daniel and Ben Murray Wines. Craig has also worked with wineries that produce within the most innovative of sustainability practices and include certified organic wines in their line-up.
Craig is passionate about making good wine accessible to everyone. He finds that with the thousands of wines out there, it can be hard for people to educate themselves on the styles and regions they enjoy drinking, and instead stick to what they know. Between his work in Italy and his partnership in Ben Murray Wines, Craig hopes to delight and interest winedrinkers with wines that are family-produced, high-quality and always interesting.
Oenophilia oéno·phil´i·a [noun]
A love [philia] of wine [oinos]. A disciplined devotion to wine.
Join our society of wine devotees.
