Richard van Ruth from The Nimble Vintner responds to an article by Katie Spain about the history and philosophy of Fox Creek, now owned by Maxwell Wines.
I read Katie Spain’s piece about Helen Watts and Fox Creek and I’ll be honest – it moved me.
Helen sounds like exactly the kind of person this industry was built by and needs more of.
Warm, principled, genuinely connected to her staff, her customers, and her patch of McLaren Vale dirt.
The fox by the creek telling her to follow it in? I mean, come on. That’s a genuinely beautiful story.
And her motto – “excellence, nothing but excellence” – is the right one.
I just think we need to talk seriously about what that actually means right now.
Fox Creek was established in 1984 and grew through the 1990s boom years.
I wasn’t running a wine business then, but I’ve spent more than 20 years in this industry and I know what that era looked like.
Demand was strong.
Export markets were hungry.
Consumers were discovering Australian wine for the first time.
The tailwind was real and it carried a lot of businesses a very long way.
You needed to make good wine and be decent to people.
That was honestly most of it.
That world doesn’t exist anymore.
The Australian wine industry today is genuinely tough.
Domestic consumption is falling. Margins are under pressure everywhere.
The consumer has more choice than ever – beer, spirits, no-and-low, the lot – and their loyalty to wine as a category isn’t something any of us can take for granted.
I see it every single day in my own small business.
What strikes me about Helen is that I think she genuinely understood something that many operators in this industry are only now being forced to reckon with: excellence isn’t a founding story.
It’s a daily decision.
It’s what you do when the easier path is right there in front of you.
Most businesses aren’t doing that.
Most are coasting – on reputation, on habit, on the comfortable assumption that the good years will come back if they just hold on long enough.
They won’t.
The industry has changed and it isn’t changing back.
The Maxwell family have inherited not just a lovely wine brand but a genuine standard. Helen and Jim set it.
I hope they keep it. And I hope the rest of us are paying attention – because in 2026, excellence isn’t aspirational.
It’s the minimum requirement for survival.
Life is simply too short to make – or drink – anything less.
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