It's like a planned hit. Design super concentrated Shiraz from Australia's best Shiraz regions - in super low quantities, about 1000 cases of each. Make sure that cult winemakers make the initial vintages ~ Sarah and Sparky Marquis of Fox Creek fame at first, then Rolf Binder of Veritas. Make the prices affordable - but pricey enough to make a statement on their quality (mostly $55). Call it Two Hands Wines. And then, of course, make sure The Hand of God (AKA Robert Parker Junior, US wine reviewer) gets to see them. This is what Adelaide businessmen Richard Mintz and Michael Twelftree have done over the past two years - in the process creating a 'shiraz specialist' portfolio that while confusing, is as blindingly impressive as a bolt of lightening. You have to like the 'over the top' style of wine - but then, that's the spirit of the times. Hollywood, sports fiascos, terrorism ... wine.

These are not, let's be quite clear, food wines. They are seriously fruit-rich and powerful - as I was tasting them I'd start by writing something like 'syrupy oak" and then would say 'HANG ON, THAT'S NOT OAK, THAT'S AN OIL SLICK OF RICH PURPLE FRUIT." The truth is somewhere in between of course, because there is quality, sweet oak here, but the fruit intensity is bright, blasting, rich and viscous. It's incredible. These wines can be a sight to behold.

Michael Twelftree's running late. Someone's hit on his luggage at the Qantas terminal and he's bagless and fresh shirt-less when he arrives. We've arranged to meet at MacPhee's Wine Cellarage in South Melbourne and we've barely sat down when he launches into the Two Hands story - I haven't even got my notebook out yet. He and his wines are alike: direct. Assertive. Charming.

He tells me that Two Hands have raised $1.5 million from overseas-based investors. That they've bought the Branson Coach House winery and vineyard at Greenock in the Barossa. That the vineyard at Greenock carries 18 acres of exquisitely promising shiraz, capable (and I quote) of producing 'one of the greatest single vineyard shirazes in the Barossa Valley'. He tells me that wines from this vineyard will be - when they're released - marketed under the Branson Coach House label, and that all Two Hands wines will now be made at the Branson Coach House facility.

"Who's making them?" I ask.
"Rolf Binder's still consulting, but we're now at the stage where we need someone full-time, so we've just employed Matt Wenk - he was 21C at Nepenthe. We reckon he's the next big thing."

"So how much wine are you making?"
"We processed 17 tonne in 2000, 120 tonne in 2001 and 1 50 tonne in 2002. We're now at our goal of 10,000 cases, and in the mid term we don't plan to exceed that level."

Twelftree then starts opening a long line of bottles - and blow me down if the Shiraz specialist doesn't open a white wine first up. It's a Riesling. Two Hands 'The Wolf' Clare Riesling 2002 ($25). About 100 cases of it made. 'Because we drink a lot of the stuff and decided it'd be cheaper to just make our own." If you're gonna make your own home-brew Riesling then 2002 probably wasn't a bad time to start - and boy, is it a nice wine. Complex, soft, intense - and it will last 10 years easy (93 points). Just don't tell the red-wine-only brigade - I mean, top-flight Riesling from a Shiraz specialist ... it's enough to make your decanter turn.

Twelftree is a straight-shooter, a direct action man, so it's no surprise that he's fronting a company that makes these kinds of wines - straight to the point. Before this venture he worked in the construction industry, and he now openly admits that the Two Hands venture is out to make money. "It makes no difference to me," he says, "whether it's wine or anything else. We saw an opportunity and we're doing what we think needs to be done to make it profitable.

"Basically we looked at a lot of the boutique, top-end producers and thought - they're run like farming operations. With our more advanced business techniques we thought we could find a niche market.

"And I don't see anything wrong with that. Because let's face it, we're not saving lives here. We're squeezing grapes into wine so that people can relax and have a few drinks." He then points to some of the back labels of the Two Hands wines. They're written in a casual, relaxed style - in the non- traditionalist, Wine-without-rules manner. Like most back labels on most wines, sometimes it works, sometimes it just sounds like a wank. Twelftree's take on it is: "We think a lot of the wine industry is full of crap and bullshit, so we're trying to write short, sharp descriptions on the packaging to avoid all that."

We then start running through the wines - a really good Shiraz-Grenache (Brave Faces 2001) for early drinking, a beautifully soft, supple, entry level McLaren Vale Shiraz (Angel's Share, $25), and then some of the fruit-bomb heavyweights from the 2000 and 2001 vintages. Pretty soon it's quite clear that armoured personnel carriers have been coming the way of Two Hands, in the guise of shiraz grapes - you just can't help but be blown away with the quality of the stuff, no matter what your preference in wine style.

It turns out that part of the secret to ail this is not so much what goes into the wines as what gets discarded. Twelftree: "We take in the best fruit we can get but we also maintain the policy that we're prepared to discard wine and withdraw it from the process if it doesn't come up to our standards. This year we discarded about 26 tonne of fruit (remember this is only a 150 tonne operation) to bulk - we take out any barrel that we think will detract from the final wines.

'If 1 could take a dig at the Australian wine industry, I'd say that too many people are trying to crop at 4.5 tonne and make stacks of $15 wine - what we need to do as an industry is make much more wine cropped at 1.5 tonne, but of much higher quality.'

The Two Hands wines aren't just big - texturally they're magnificent. Lush, plush, velvety - call them what you will, as a group they glide through the mouth like raw and urgent foreplay. If they have a weak point it's their structure, a point almost entirely due to the amount of fruit weight crammed into them; it's hard to maintain any kind of elegant control when there's so much loaded into a small space, as the area around my waistline proves more and more each day. I'd cellar the $55 range for five to eight years no problem, but I wouldn't cellar them for great lengths of time - but then, to some extent, this style of mega-wine is an unknown. Critics say this style of wine will fail apart in time. Others criticise structure. We all have to bear in mind that these kinds of criticisms are the very ones labelled at Grange when it was first released - we all just have to wait. What will they be like at 20 years? .

One of the wines that does have structure is the yet-to-be- released Two Hands Barossa Valley 'Ares' Shiraz 2001. This is not an ordinary wine. It's almost solid it's so thick and black and powerful, and if you're a cult hunter this would have to be the wine most likely as the next big shiraz headline. It's a canon-shot of explosive shiraz. There were only 660 three-packs of it produced. It'll be released in April next year. It'll be $120 per bottle. And although Michael Twelftree has been leaning forward and talking through most, of the tasting of the Two Hands wines, he leans back once the 'Ares' is poured. When I pick myself up off the floor and smile, he simply says: 'its pretty much bullet proof, that one.' Which is the kind of self-confidence you can have when everyone's fighting with knives and you've just pulled out a rocket launcher.

The main game though for Two Hands is the range of super- premium, single region, single variety shiraz releases from the Barossa, McLaren Vale and Padthaway, with Heathcote and Clare shiraz wines due to come on stream next year. All are priced at $55, a price Twelftree is very specific about: 'As a consumer I'm sick and tired of going to buy a favourite wine, only to see that it's gone up another $10 for the next vintage. So we looked at our costs, at our grape contracts, barrel costs etc and set a ballsy price early that we knew we could hold for three or four years - five years if possible.'

Most of these wines are sold overseas, though they're also available via the website (wwwtwohandswines.com) and have limited retail distribution through East End cellars in Adelaide, Corno wine and spirits in Melbourne, and the Ultimo Wine Centre in Sydney. The Lily's Garden McLaren Vale Shiraz has also been released in the upcoming Australian Wine Exchange prospectus, a move Twelftree explains simply: "We just looked at the AWX and thought, what if this is the next big thing? There are only so many wines they can reasonably list each year - the smart thing Is to get in early and see what happens.'

All the Two Hands wines have a "name". Bella's Garden, Lily's Garden, Sophie's Garden - the list goes on. Many of these names refer to either daughters or partners - "Basically,' Twelftree says, "if you're female and hang around with us, you've got a good chance of getting your name on a wine.

Two Hands 'Bella's Garden' Barossa Valley Shiraz 2001 ($55): Raw, savoury, smoky, and cedary with a super- sweet edge - and an unusual sense of Rhone-style funk. The palate is savoury-sweet and smoky with blasts of black fruit power and all the kinds of mouth-watering, mouth filling, overflowing chocolate-and-purple fruit richness you'd expect - though with some coarseness on the finish. Bright, juvenile, and impressive.
Drink: 2004-2009. 91 points.

Two Hands 'Sophie's Garden' Padthaway Shiraz 2001 ($55): This took some hours to open its mouth wide and give a full bore roar, but when it did I have to say I was floored. There's so much purple plummy fruit power here Willie Wonker would adore it, and it's matched to waves of sour cherry, vanilla bean and musky clove scents/flavours. A seriously awesome wine. Drink: 2004-2010. 94 points

Two Hands Lily's Garden McLaren Vale Shiraz 2001 ($55). Settled, pure, integrated liquorice and chocolate scents announce a wine of significant power and intensity. The palate is both juicy and savoury, with a plum and chocolate sweetness reaching out to all corners of the mouth and a rapaciously juicy, rich, tannic, focussed finish. High-quality McLaren Vale Shiraz with perhaps less structural fineness than it'd need to age long term, this is nonetheless another bruising beauty from this screamingly impressive new label.
Drink: Now-2008. 93 points.

Two Hands 'Ares' Barossa Valley Shiraz 2001 ($120, packaged in 3-packs): A black coalface of deeply blackberries wine. Liquorice. Vanilla. Leaps and bounds of tar and cassis, with both massive fruit weight and - and here's the thing - massive persistence. Polished, reduced, and super-produced, this was a barrel sample, so not officially rated, but with so little of it in store this is pretty much the wine. What I saw was a 98-point wine, and racing.