Janelle Badrice has childhood memories of helping dress the Zerk family’s Barossa Vintage Festival float for the parade, pinning grapes to the arbour on the back of the wagon and dressing up in hand-made German outfits, with her sisters Kristen and Danielle.

Like all children who grow up with a strong heritage, Vintage was simply part of their lives, a celebration of another year in the Barossa.

“To be honest I reckon my first memories were the ones going on the float,” Janelle said of Barossa Vintage Festival.

“Mum made them (the outfits), we all had a colour, mine was the blue, Kristen’s was the yellow, Danielle’s was the red and then you could see some of my cousins up here with the green, there were lots of us…,” Janelle added, pointing to images in an old photo album from the 1980s.

“We used to carry little baskets of grapes, I reused that same outfit a few years later.”

Fast forward and Janelle and sister Kristen, who together own Z WINE, enjoy sharing the Barossa Vintage Festival story with their own children, with the six kids from the next generation forging their own memories of what the Festival means to them.

“Well, I think now it’s important for us to get our kids involved, that’s why every year we get the truck. Our philosophy now is to get our cellar door on the back of the truck, to promote our cellar door to get people in here and locals who… have already been in here to recognise it - and to have all our kids involved so they have memories like us,” Janelle said of the Tanunda cellar door.

“It’s always very exciting, so we always have live music on the back because it represents what we do in here with that acoustic music.

“Obviously (it’s) different to what we used to do, it would be great to recreate the old 80s ones.”

Like snacking on dill cucumbers and mettwurst, Janelle said it wasn’t until she started travelling that she realised what was unique about growing up in the Barossa.

“After I left high school, I went straight in, did the winemaking degree,” Janelle said.

“I travelled overseas, like I did vintages in Italy, France. The French Declaration of Vintage and all that is amazing. A lot of what we do in the Barossa is going to those European (traditions) so you can see similarities and go, ‘ah that’s why we do that.’

“And then I did vintages in Sonoma in America, I spent seven years in the Hunter Valley making wine.

“I started winemaking at 17…in terms of Vintages, this year would be my 28th vintage or something like that, but that’s not including growing up on a vineyard and grape picking and all that type of thing! Janelle shared.

“It’s from going away that I realised what was special about the Barossa.”

As an experienced winemaker whose heritage is deeply connected to the Barossa landscape, Janelle has seen a variety of conditions and circumstances with Vintage over the decades – but she said that doesn’t necessarily make the experience easier.

“Personally, I think every year you should get more comfortable with it, but I think every year I get more nervous because it’s one of those things that it doesn’t let you get comfortable.

“And I think that’s what’s exciting about it. I think that’s what people like about wine and winemaking, it’s a primary industry at the end of the day and everything changes, when you think that you’ve got it all down pat you learn more.”

The 2025 Barossa Vintage Festival begins today and runs until Sunday, providing a smorgasbord of cultural, historical, community and culinary events and experiences, each of them a celebration of what it means to be uniquely ‘Barossa’.