Established in 2007, the Young Gun of Wine Award is our top trophy. It goes to an emerging producer that is not only making outstanding wine, but also demonstrating vision and leadership, and nailing the entire pitch, packaging and presentation of their product.
Taste is subjective. Every individual is the best judge of their own palate. Established in 2007, the People’s Choice is decided by the public, choosing from the list of finalists in our annual winemaker awards.
The Winemaker’s Choice trophy is our peer award, chosen by that year’s finalists. This trophy was introduced from 2013.
The Best New Act goes to a first-time finalist in our winemaker awards that is making a profound impression. This trophy was introduced from 2013.
The Danger Zone is the only trophy in our winemaker awards that goes to a wine product. It recognises a wine that successfully pushes the boundaries. This trophy was introduced from 2017.
The Vigneron is an award which celebrates makers that also lovingly tend to the land and the vines that they make wine from.
NSW/ACT, Hunter Valley
Finalist
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
Kenisha and Alisdair Tulloch’s Aeon Wines is a Hunter Valley label with geology at its heart – quite literally. The single-vineyard wines are named after the soil types they come from, with the geology and climate of each site depicted on the label artwork and the grape variety relegated to the back. The current range spans the Alluvium field blend of syrah, touriga nacional and viognier from the Field of Mars Vineyard; the Vertosol syrah from Tawarri in Merriwa; the Ferrosol syrah from a small leased block; the Light Dry Red – a nod to the Hunter’s historic shiraz and pinot noir burgundy blends; and the Soleil Fumé semillon from the Latara Vineyard. All fruit for the single-vineyard wines is grown and managed by Alisdair himself. The motto is Wines of Earth and Sky, and the wines live up to it.
Victoria, Yarra Valley, Heathcote
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
2024 Finalist
2021 Finalist
Stuart Dudine’s Alkimi Wines is built around his passion for both the Yarra Valley and Rhône varieties, with marsanne and syrah at the core alongside chardonnay, pinot noir, grenache, sparkling and rosé. The wines are pitched consistently toward the elegant end of the spectrum – natural yeast, no additions except sulphur, unfined and mostly unfiltered, with a No Additions range where not even sulphur is used. Now working from a dedicated leased space in the Yarra Valley and selling direct to wholesale accounts across Victoria, Alkimi is entering a more settled and focused phase after a decade of building the foundations.
Great Western
2026 Finalist
2021 Finalist
2020 Finalist
Haydn Black and Darcy ‘Ginger’ Naunton started Black & Ginger with too many beers around a campfire and a wine they’d been talking about making for years. Ten vintages later, the label is celebrating its first decade with a cellar door – more wine bar than tasting room, with comfy couches and a table at the centre of it, which tells you exactly what the project has always been about. Based in the Grampians and drawing primarily from the Arrawatta Vineyard, Black & Ginger makes wines from interesting varieties that most people in the region aren’t growing: grenache, orange muscat, graciano, tinta roriz, tinta cão, touriga nacional, and a five-variety Iberian-inspired red blend called Cinco Rojas alongside the label’s shiraz and rosé. The approach is simple, direct and unapologetically fun.
South Australia, Wrattonbully, Limestone Coast
Finalist
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
2025 Best New Act
A lot of winemakers who grow up in wine-growing regions romanticise their old stomping grounds, and often deliberately work towards returning to their home regions when starting their own labels. Not so much Lauren Hansen, who grew up in the Limestone Coast region and sought to escape it – only to find that her career drew her back. Hansen’s own label, Bloomfield, celebrates the Limestone Coast through a mix of unusual varieties – currently grüner veltliner, petit verdot and mencía – and allows her opportunities for unfettered winemaking expression. As of early 2026, Bloomfield is no longer a side-hustle. It is the whole job.
McLaren Vale
2026 Finalist
Fabiano Minchella is a born-and-bred McLaren Vale winemaker whose By Fabiano label makes a case – quietly but with mounting conviction – that the south of Italy belongs in the Vale. Launched from the 2020 vintage, the range spans negroamaro, primitivo, fiano, vermentino, greco, a skin-contact macerato and a rosato, all from estate fruit and all made with a philosophy rooted in Minchella’s extended time working in Basilicata and Puglia. The wines are a grower-maker proposition: the family owns and manages all vineyards, with a purpose-planted Italian-style block on the winery site – seven varieties grown at unusually tight spacing in the Italian tradition – the physical embodiment of the experiment. Southern Italian varieties in McLaren Vale is no longer a novelty; By Fabiano is one of the labels that has done the most to prove it shouldn’t be.
Hunter Valley
South Australia, Adelaide Hills, Barossa Valley
Finalist
2026 Finalist
Sophie Melton is, in the most literal sense, a product of the Barossa. The daughter of Charlie Melton – whose Nine Popes helped define what Barossa GSM could be – she was in the winery before she was in high school, and has never really left. Now winemaker at Charles Melton Wines, she makes the classic Barossa reds her father built his reputation on – grenache, shiraz, mataro and their blends – with the same conviction that the region’s old vines are worth defending, not reinventing. Alongside that, her own Domaine Sophie Claire label gives her room to move: a small, intentional range in deliberately contemporary packaging – a world away from the traditional Charles Melton aesthetic – anchored by a riesling she is most passionate about, and orbiting outward from there into a GSM riff that swaps mataro for riesling in the blend, a rosé, and a Méthode Traditionnelle sparkling rosé – the traditional method used to make champagne, where a second fermentation occurs in the bottle to create bubbles. Two labels, one region, one winemaker finding her own voice within a lineage she’s proud to carry.
South Australia, Adelaide Hills
Finalist
2026 Finalist
Third-generation winemaker Jack Tomich’s work straddles two projects – his family’s label, Tomich Family Wines, and his own more experimental label, Cloudbreak. Both make wines predominantly from fruit sourced from the Tomich Family vineyard in the Adelaide Hills – the same place where Jack himself grew up. Here he crafts a broad array of wines made from regional stalwarts chardonnay and pinot noir, as well as syrah, sauvignon blanc, pinot gris and gewürztraminer While the methods and the resulting wines are vary between the two labels, they’re both two sides of the same coin – a never-ending quest to best express the nuances of the family vineyard through purity of expression and detailed winemaking.
South Australia, Victoria
2026 Finalist
Ella Hoban’s résumé is an impressive one, but all you really need to know about why she deserves your attention can be distilled into one line: at the age of 33, she became the Group Sparkling Winemaker for Vinarchy, one of the largest wine business in the Southern Hemisphere. In this role, she directs and oversees all of the sparkling winemaking for several brands that are household names in Australia – including Croser, Jacob’s Creek, Grant Burge, and Yarra Burn – as well as a suite of sparkling wines for Vinarchy’s commercial portfolio. It’s a role that sees her working across a wide range of winegrowing regions and fruit sources, utilising a vast array of winemaking methods, to produce consistently delicious wines across a wide range of price points. She’s hands-on, too – challenging the idea that lead winemakers at larger companies spend more time looking at spreadsheets than monitoring ferments or at the tasting bench. To top it all off, she’s also found the time to take on the role of being Croser’s global brand ambassador, to lecture in sparkling winemaking at Adelaide University, and to help build Wine Biddies, a networking program for young women in winemaking. With such illustrious achievements already under her belt, her future in wine certainly looks bright.
NSW/ACT, Shoalhaven Coast, Hilltops
Finalist
2026 Finalist
Wally Cupitt came back to the family winery between jobs in 2010, intending to help out. He never really left. Now head winemaker at Cupitt’s Estate – the South Coast operation his mother Rosie built from the ground up in Ulladulla – Cupitt makes wines that are shaped as much by where they’re drunk as where the grapes are grown: relaxed, food-pitched, and built to be shared. The range draws almost entirely from cool-climate Southern NSW, with Hilltops, Tumbarumba and the Canberra District providing the fruit across a Signature range led by Italian varieties – arneis, vermentino, fiano, sangiovese, montepulciano, nebbiolo – and a Project range that gives the winery room to explore. In a region still finding its identity, Cupitt is among those doing the defining.
South Australia, Adelaide Hills
2026 Finalist
Glynn Thoman spent more than a decade as a marine engineer before pinot noir pulled him off course – and when it did, it pulled him hard. Dear Zahra, the label he launched in 2022 with his wife Kamillah, is the result of that obsession distilled into a single-minded project: 100% pinot noir, 100% organic fruit, made with minimal intervention and a desire to see how the one variety speaks across different Australian terroirs. Two wines currently anchor the range – a saignée rosé and a pinot noir – both sourced from the Adelaide Hills, with the Macedon Ranges now entering the picture as Thoman shifts his focus toward Victoria. It’s early days, but the direction is unusually clear for a label this young.
Western Australia, Geographe
2026 Finalist
Tim Fearon came to wine the long way around – through ecology, earth sciences and years working in the conservation of native habitats. His prior life was spent reading landscapes, understanding soils, and tracking the relationships between land and living things. When wine eventually grabbed him, it grabbed him through exactly those lenses. The revelation, as he describes it, was realising that the physical world – soil type, slope, aspect, rainfall, solar radiation – could be captured and expressed in a glass. That idea has never left him, and it sits at the centre of everything Fearon makes. Launched from the 2023 vintage and based in Western Australia’s Ferguson Valley, the label focuses on alternative varieties that Fearon believes are perfectly suited to the Geographe region: fiano, grenache, tempranillo and mourvèdre among them, made with minimal intervention and a scientist’s attention to detail. Geographe is still finding its voice as a wine region, and Fearon is among those writing the sentences.
NSW/ACT, South Coast
2026 Finalist
Thomas Colman makes wine in one of the most unlikely corners of the Australian wine map – the Blue Mountains, part of NSW’s broad South Coast Zone, where no established wine region exists, no blueprint has been laid down, and the conditions sit permanently on the edge of what viticulture can tolerate. That precariousness is precisely the point. His label, Frankly This Wine Was Made By Bob, is a father-and-son project with Bob Colman, run out of Blackheath and connected to a natural wine bar, bottle shop and restaurant of the same family on Govetts Leap Road. The wines are natural – zero-zero, a term used to describe wines made with absolutely no additions and nothing removed, meaning zero added sulphur and zero added yeast – made from organically farmed pinot noir, and shaped by the particular wildness and variability of a region still being figured out. This is vigneronship in the most literal sense: Colman prunes the vines, thins the shoots, lifts the wires, nets the fruit, picks it, and processes it himself.
NSW/ACT, Mudgee
2026 Finalist
Nick Tinant is a former hospitality professional turned winemaker whose Front Left Wines label – launched from the 2024 vintage and based in the Hunter Valley – makes small-batch, minimal-intervention wines from alternative varieties grown across NSW, with a particular focus on sangiovese from Mudgee. The current range spans a sangiovese rosé, a sangiovese red and a vermentino, sealed with beeswax from local beekeepers and built around a philosophy of maximum authenticity and approachability – wines aimed squarely at drinkers who find the traditional wine world a little too stiff.
NSW/ACT, Hunter Valley
2026 Finalist
Emily (nee Glover) and Hugh Spinaze are a Hunter Valley couple who met in the cellar and never quite left. Both entered the wine industry straight out of high school – Hugh in 2013, Emily in 2016 – and Glover Wines, launched from the 2022 vintage, is the formal expression of what those years of shared experience have built toward: a small-batch, site-first label rooted in the Hunter’s classic varieties, made with a quiet technical philosophy that prioritises what the vineyard gives over what the winery adds. The range spans an Oakey Creek semillon, a Wollombi Brook chardonnay, a Hunter River Burg shyrah and a rosé – each tied to a specific site, each made entirely by the two of them from grape to bottle.
NSW/ACT, Orange
2026 Finalist
Aaron Onegin-Ward and Rebecca Milne are a winemaking duo based in Orange, NSW, who launched Grape Pirates in 2024 after years working together in the region’s vineyards and cellars. The label makes small-batch, minimal-intervention wines from Orange fruit – currently a riesling, a four-variety rosé, a pinot noir and a merlot blend – sourced from vineyards the pair lease and farm themselves, including a 27-year-old riesling and merlot site they have been progressively restoring since 2023. Fun, unpretentious and hands-on from vine to bottle, Grape Pirates is a label built on the simple conviction that the best way to make good wine is to show up and do the work.
Victoria, Mornington Peninsula
2026 Finalist
Lucas Blanck grew up at Domaine Paul Blanck in Alsace – one of that region’s most respected family estates – before a vintage in Australia in 2010 led to a life on the Mornington Peninsula instead. Kerri Greens, the label he runs with his wife Alyce, launched in 2015 and has grown from a single-vineyard chardonnay into a range spanning riesling, chardonnay, pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, rosé and a small clutch of aromatic and experimental wines. A grower-maker in the truest sense, Blanck leases and farms four vineyards across Red Hill South, Balnarring and Tuerong with organic practices across all sites (not certified) – and the project is deliberately counter-programmed to the region’s pinot noir and chardonnay dominance. Riesling is the true focus, made in an Alsatian idiom that has no real precedent on the Peninsula, and it is quietly reshaping what the region is capable of.
NSW/ACT, Hunter Valley
Finalist
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
Valentina Moresco grew up in a winegrowing family in Montà, Piedmont, studied viticulture and oenology in Alba – directly between Barolo and Barbaresco – and has been making wine at Krinklewood Biodynamic Vineyard in the Hunter Valley’s Broke Fordwich subregion since 2018. Now promoted to General Manager of the estate, she oversees not just the winemaking but the broader life of the farm – vineyard, grounds and livestock included – while continuing to craft a range that spans Hunter classics alongside skin-contact wines, sparkling and a non-alcoholic offering. What began as the meeting of Piedmontese tradition and New Zealand precision has become something distinctly her own: rigorous, inventive and deeply connected to a place she never expected to call home.
Victoria, Macedon Ranges
Finalist
2026 Finalist
Patrick Wood and Greta Darling-Filby run three things at once from Kyneton Ridge Estate in the Macedon Ranges: the estate wines for Pat’s family business, a contract winemaking operation serving labels across the region, and their own label Harbinger – a roving single-vineyard project that follows them across Victoria’s most compelling growing regions. The Harbinger range spans a Heathcote fiano, chardonnay, grenache nouveau, GSM, syrah, cabernet franc rosé and pinot gris, made with flexible, low-intervention winemaking and a curiosity about what Victoria’s less-championed varieties can do in the right places. The Kyneton Ridge estate wines, anchored by the Skipping Rabbit pinot noir from a 25-year-old organically farmed vineyard, sit alongside. Together the two labels cover a lot of Victorian ground – and that’s entirely the point.
South Australia, McLaren Vale
2026 Finalist
Michael Williams is a McLaren Vale winemaker whose L’Anima label – launched from the 2024 vintage – makes a small, considered range of wines exclusively from climate-appropriate alternative Mediterranean varieties: fiano, vermentino, sangiovese, grenache, nero d’avola, aglianico and muscat blanc. Built on a winemaking education assembled across Ngeringa, Tuscany, SC Pannell, Moorilla and several years as winemaker at Bondar Wines, L’Anima is where all of that finally converged into something personal. The wines are made with clay and sandstone amphora and large-format Slavonian oak, rooted in a philosophy that positions wine as something primarily consumed at the table – science in service to art, and Mediterranean variety as the argument for McLaren Vale’s future.
Victoria, Heathcote
Finalist
2026 Finalist
Alex Croker makes wines under two labels that tell two sides of the same story. Little Brunswick Wine Co. is the experimental arm – born in a Brunswick sharehouse in 2017, built to play, and populated with alternative varieties, unconventional blends, and a wine community spirit that Croker has always worn openly. Alexander Direen, released from 2022, is something else: a more considered, personal statement, its name taken from his soon-to-be married name and anchored to the Heathcote shiraz country he grew up in. Between them, the two labels span a restrained but adventurous corner of the Victorian wine landscape – Central Victorian in soul, untraditional in detail, and unapologetically built to be shared and returned to.
NSW/ACT, Hunter Valley
Finalist
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
2024 Finalist
Meagan and James Becker of M & J Becker Wines have carved a distinctive niche in the winemaking world by bridging the vinous landscapes of two continents. Their journey spans regions of New South Wales, Australia, and the renowned wine regions of California, USA. In Australia, their offering includes a dozen wines, ranging from Tumbarumba Pinot Noir and Hunter Valley Chardonnay to Hilltops Nebbiolo. While their commitment to transmitting terroir extends to managing a vineyard in Hunter Valley, where they converted to Certified Organic through ACO late in 2019. All the M & J Becker Wines from Australia are made in a collaborative winemaking facility shared with the other rising stars of the Hunter Valley.
South Australia, Robe, Limestone Coast
2026 Finalist
Jin Maekawa is an Osaka-born, Limestone Coast-based winemaker whose Maekawa Wines label – released for the first time at the end of 2025 – arrives at an interesting moment: while much of the new wave in Australian wine looks to alternative varieties and making ‘natty’ wines, Maekawa has turned toward the classic reds of the Limestone Coast with fresh eyes and genuine conviction. The ‘VDT’ wine is a sangiovese and cabernet sauvignon blend from Padthaway and Coonawarra; the ‘RC’ a shiraz and cabernet from Robe – traditional varieties, traditional regions, but made with the sensibility of someone who came to wine through hospitality rather than inheritance, and who has no interest in making them the way they have always been made. Both are built for the table, deeply personal, and designed to remind you of a good time rather than demand your full attention.
Victoria, NSW/ACT, Hunter Valley, Murray Darling
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
What happens when you take two experienced hospitality professionals with no formal winemaking training, get them to fall in love with both winemaking and Sicilian grape varieties, and let them ferment wine in traditional Indian clay vessels? You might end up with something like Majama Wines, an exciting new Hunter Valley-based project by Rojer Rathod and Millie Shorter, whose second vintage release – a tight lineup of zibbibo, inzolia, and nero d’avola – has already turned heads in the wine trade. With a minimal-intervention philosophy in the cellar that’s been dialled in with a clear focus on Sicilian varieties and fermentation in clay, as well as some of the most striking packaging currently on shelves, Rathod and Shorter are setting themselves up to become a striking new voice in the Australian wine landscape.
Victoria, Grampians
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
2024 Finalist
In the heart of Western Victoria, Ben Luker’s Meredith label emerges as a reflection of his rich and varied journey in the wine industry. With a background that spans an array of roles, from restaurant service to in-depth wine research, Luker’s foray into winemaking is a testament to his deep-seated passion for the craft. The 2023 debut of Meredith, from the 2023 vintage, is not just a milestone for Luker but an ode to Western Victoria. His approach is unmistakably ‘punter-friendly,’ emphasizing low-fi winemaking that underscores the intrinsic qualities of varietal riesling and grenache, with the Meredith lineup complimented by a rosé and pét-nat.
NSW/ACT, Hilltops, Orange
2026 Finalist
Mem Hemmings is a British-born, Hunter Valley-based winemaker whose Meredith label – launched from the 2022 vintage – makes natural wines from lesser-known NSW regions with a no-additions philosophy, low-impact packaging and a set of ethical commitments that run all the way from grower relationships to how the wine arrives at your door. The current range spans a cabernet sauvignon rosé, a chardonnay amber – made with nine months of skin contact – a chenin blanc, a sparkling riesling, a light red blend and wines available in 250ml recyclable cans and 25-litre refillable kegs. Fruit comes from vineyards across the Hunter Valley, Orange, Hilltops, Tumbarumba and Gundagai. Meredith is a small label with a clear voice, and that voice is increasingly hard to ignore.
South Australia, Adelaide Hills
2026 Finalist
Martin Moran is an Argentinian-born winemaker and research scientist based in Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills, where Mordrelle Wines – a family project co-founded with his wife Michelle and her parents – has been making wine since 2010. The range spans blanc de blancs sparkling wine, chardonnay, pinot noir, syrah, barbera, tempranillo, cabernet sauvignon and rosé, all from Adelaide Hills fruit and all defined by one overriding philosophy: extended time on lees. Where most producers move wines to bottle as quickly as commercially viable, Moran waits – sometimes years – believing that the complexity, texture and natural antioxidant protection that comes from lees contact is irreplaceable. The label’s labels carry the artwork of his father, Argentine artist José Luis Morán.
South Australia, Mount Gambier, Riverland
2026 Finalist
Waldo Smit is a self-taught winemaker who started in a suburban garage with 100-kilogram batches and fruit from Chalmers in Heathcote, and built from there. Muto Wine – the name taken from the Latin mutō, meaning to change – is a family operation run from a converted shed on a farm in Tallarook, Central Victoria, making Mediterranean varieties from warm-climate regions alongside classic varieties from cooler ones. The range spans vermentino, picpoul, macabero, malvasia, moscato giallo, fiano, tinta barroca, syrah, malbec, chardonnay, pinot noir and rosé – sourced from the Riverland, Beechworth, Adelaide Hills and Mount Gambier – at prices that don’t ask anyone to overthink the spend. Lo-fi, sustainably sourced, solar-powered, and built for everyday drinking without sacrificing genuine interest.
Victoria, Alpine Valleys
2026 Finalist
Meg Wallace is a winemaker at Billy Button Wines in Victoria’s Alpine Valleys whose Nacre label – launched from the 2021 vintage – makes a small, intentional range of wines from the region’s Italian varieties, with vermentino and refosco at its current core. Named for mother of pearl, and in tribute to five generations of women in Wallace’s family all sharing the name Margaret, Nacre is a quietly personal project built around the particular parcels and growers she has come to know best. The wines are textural, savoury and handled with a light hand – a label from a region whose Italian variety credentials are still only beginning to be understood.
Hunter Valley, McLaren Vale
2026 Finalist
Samuel Rumpit is a Hunter Valley-based winemaker whose Noman label – launched from the 2024 vintage – makes small-batch wines from alternative varieties sourced wherever they’re growing best that year, with no intention of repeating a wine or a region from one vintage to the next. The current range spans a McLaren Vale montepulciano, a Hunter Valley fiano and a tempranillo rosé, all made with Hungarian oak, minimal intervention and a deliberate refusal to take wine too seriously. Noman sits at the approachable, exploratory end of the Australian alternative variety conversation – swimming pool wine, as Rumpit calls it, made for you and your mates.
Victoria, Yarra Valley, Pyrenees
2026 Finalist
2023 Finalist
Callie Jemmeson is a Melbourne-based winemaker whose Pachamama label makes wines across ten varieties sourced from Victoria’s most compelling cool-climate regions – Yarra Valley, Heathcote, King Valley and beyond – under two labels with distinct personalities. Pachamama covers the more considered end of the range, with pinot noir, shiraz, chardonnay and Italian varieties; sibling label Cloak and Dagger sits at the effortlessly drinkable, everyday end. In 2024, both brands were acquired by Joval Family Wines, bringing expanded resources and estate vineyard access while leaving creative direction firmly with Jemmeson. The philosophy across both labels has never wavered: delicious, honest wines without ego or pretence, made with curiosity and a deliberate refusal to be bound by rules.
South Australia, McLaren Vale
2026 Finalist
Ollie Bevan is a first-generation winegrower making shiraz and grenache from a small organic (not certified) estate in Blewitt Springs, McLaren Vale – one of the subregion’s most compelling pockets for both varieties. Parea, launched from the 2022 vintage, is built around a single dry-farmed shiraz vineyard planted in 1992 and a young block of own-rooted, bush-vine grenache planted from cuttings Bevan took himself from highly regarded local sites. The wines are made with minimal intervention – sulphur the only addition, unfined and unfiltered – and a vineyard-first philosophy that prizes site and seasonal honesty over stylistic consistency. Small, serious, and deeply rooted in place.
Victoria, Gippsland
2026 Finalist
Kaden Boekhoorn came to wine through a decade in specialty coffee, drawn by the same fascination with how place and process shape flavour. Passage Wines, launched from the 2024 vintage, is a small Gippsland project focused on distinctive parcels from Baw Baw Shire’s cool volcanic hills – currently a pinot gris and a syrah, both from dry-grown sites where Boekhoorn spent five years learning to farm before making his first commercial wines. The approach is minimal intervention with a strong emphasis on site, patience in the cellar, and wines built for texture and longevity over immediate impact. Passage sits in the thoughtful, grower-producer tradition that Gippsland has quietly built for itself.
Victoria, Yarra Valley
Finalist
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
2024 Finalist
The first release of the Patch wines came from the 2020 vintage. Approaching wine from a varied wine trade background that began with studies in viticulture, Matt Talbot crafts the Patch Wines as a business partnership with winemaker Kirilly Gordon – with Matt now making all the wines entirely himself. From a modest beginning of three wines – a ‘Shed Red’ Bordeaux-inspired blend with a Turkish twist, a ‘Nebbiolo Bianco’ (which is actually the arneis grape variety), and a marsanne – the Patch lineup has expanded to encompass over 20 different grape varieties, including a Pyrenees nebbiolo from the famed Malakoff Vineyard and a Yarra Valley grüner veltliner, made either as varietal wines or blends. All ferments are small batch, using a combination of vessels in the making – from tank, to oak, to ceramic egg, to terracotta – to deliver wines that are juicy, textural and delicious, not to mention pleasingly democratically priced.
South Australia, Adelaide Hills
Finalist
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
Matthew Large left one of the most coveted winemaking roles in Australia – overseeing Shaw + Smith, Tolpuddle, MMAD and The Other Wine Co. – at the end of 2024 to farm his own grapes. It was, he will tell you, the only logical next step. Praeter, the label he launched in 2018 as a side-project built around a love of nebbiolo, is now a full-time proposition: two single-site nebbiolos, a Langhe nebbiolo and a declassified Italian red blend from the Pyrenees and Piedmont, plus – from the 2025 vintage – a chardonnay from the Magpie Block in the Southern Fleurieu and a pinot noir from the Truscott Block in the Adelaide Hills, both grown, farmed and made by Large himself. The leap from winemaker to vigneron was always the destination. Now he is there.
Strathbogie Ranges, Yarra Valley
2026 Finalist
Ray Chen is a New Zealand-trained winemaker whose Victorian label Rongo Wines draws fruit from single vineyards across the state – currently the Strathbogie Ranges and the Yarra Valley – and is built around a single governing idea: wine as part of a food experience, specifically the food Chen grew up eating. The current range spans a skin-contact riesling, a straight riesling, a syrah, a rosé and an aglianico, all unfined and unfiltered, all made with a researcher’s instinct for exploring what different winemaking approaches can reveal from the same source of fruit. The name Rongo refers to the Māori god of cultivated food – an anchor in Chen’s New Zealand heritage and a deliberate statement about where wine belongs: at the table, alongside something worth eating.
Tasmania
2026 Finalist
Sam Rush is a Tasmanian winemaker whose Rush Wines label – launched from the 2021 vintage and made in the Tamar Valley – makes small-batch, site-driven pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot gris from carefully selected vineyards, including a block of pinot noir in Rosevears that Rush leases and farms himself. The approach is wild fermentation, no fining, minimal filtration and a winemaker whose instinct is to let the fruit carry the wine rather than the cellar impose a shape on it. Rush Wines sits in the precise, cool-climate tradition that Tasmania does better than almost anywhere – unpretentious, fruit-forward and built to reflect the island honestly.
Hunter Valley
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
2024 Finalist
2023 Finalist
2022 Winemaker's Choice
2022 Finalist
Peta Kotz’s Sabi Wabi is her homage to reworking the traditions of the Hunter, of searching for “beauty amongst imperfection”. Semillon is the foundation of the brand she launched in 2019 while working for biodynamic Hunter winery Krinklewood, and she steadfastly says it will remain that way, although her lo-fi making, with no subtractions and no adds, bar a fraction of sulphur, and employment of a raft of alternative vessels is also applied to other whites, red wine and rosé.
McLaren Vale
2026 Finalist
2021 Finalist
Charlie O’Brien made his first wine before he finished high school – a shiraz in 2015 made with his father Kevin at the family winery, Kangarilla Road, in McLaren Vale. He has never really stopped since. Silent Noise, the label he has been building since those first student vintages, has grown from five wines to ten, found distribution across eight international markets, and established O’Brien as one of the Vale’s most energetic young voices. The range draws on McLaren Vale’s classic varieties – grenache, shiraz, cabernet – alongside Italian varieties sourced from the Riverland and, from the 2026 vintage, a cool-climate pinot noir from Mount Gambier. His winemaking philosophy is technically precise but instinctively flavour-first: let the fruit sing, and don’t hide it behind overworked winemaking.
Tasmania
2026 Finalist
Jake Sheedy co-founded Sisu in 2021 on a 95-hectare farm in Tasmania’s Coal River Valley, developing a 25-hectare vineyard from bare paddock, building a 400-tonne winery, and opening a cellar door – all within four years and on land that previously ran sheep. The name is Finnish, meaning something like quiet determination and inner grit shaped by nature’s most testing moments. It suits the project. The current range spans pinot noir, chardonnay, riesling, pinot gris, viognier, gewürztraminer, gamay, syrah and nebbiolo – each variety matched to one of three distinct soil types on the estate – with the wines characterised by fruit clarity, restraint and a winemaker whose instinct is to get out of the way when the site is doing its job.
Swan Valley
2026 Finalist
Yuri Berns is the senior winemaker at Sittella Wines in the Swan Valley – a family estate founded by his parents Simon and Maaike in 1993 – where he has been building a sparkling wine program of genuine ambition alongside a range of still wines sourced from the Swan Valley, Margaret River and Pemberton. The flagship Grand Vintage ‘Marie Christien Lugten’ – a Pemberton pinot noir and chardonnay traditional-method sparkling wine aged for a minimum of 36 months in bottle – has become the label’s prestige statement, while a new estate-planted albariño block in the Swan Valley signals where Berns believes the region’s future lies. A fifth-generation Western Australian with a Champagne obsession and a long-term commitment to soil health and climate adaptation, Berns is quietly making one of the most considered cases for the Swan Valley as a fine wine region.
Tasmania
2026 Finalist
Andrew Trio is head winemaker at Small Wonder, a Tasmanian wine estate on the western ridge of the Tamar Valley, with a second vineyard in the Coal River Valley acquired in 2024. The 20-hectare Tamar estate – originally planted in 1998 as Goaty Hill and purchased by the Overstory group in 2020 – is now certified organic, equipped with a purpose-built winery completed in 2024, and producing pinot noir, chardonnay, riesling, sauvignon blanc and pinot gris across two ranges: the accessible Landscape Series and the premium Auburn collection. The sparkling program, anchored by a blanc de blancs and a blanc de noir, has quickly become a point of distinction. The overarching philosophy is precise, restrained and site-driven – cool-climate tension over richness, freshness over weight, and the vineyard allowed to do most of the talking.
Geelong, Murray Darling
2026 Finalist
Scott Cosgriff is a former human rights lawyer turned winemaker whose Tampopo label – based halfway between Melbourne and Ballarat – makes small-batch, acid-driven wines from fruit sourced across Victoria and NSW. The range spans sangiovese, pinot noir, chardonnay, vermentino, a skin-contact riesling called Holus Bolus, a rosado, and a traditional-method lambrusco under the Radio Tampopo sub-label. Maceration times across the range run from three days to 150, which tells you something about the breadth of curiosity at work. The philosophy is food-first, unhurried, and rooted in the idea that wine can be both an everyday staple and something irreplaceable – accessible without being ordinary.
Tasmania
Winemaker's Choice
Danger Zone
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
2024 Winemaker's Choice
2024 Finalist
2024 Danger Zone
Matthias and Lauren Utzinger are the Swiss-Tasmanian partnership behind one of the Tamar Valley’s most purposeful young estates. Matthias brings a European winemaking formation that spans Switzerland, Provence and the southern Rhône; Lauren brings a childhood steeped in northern Tasmania. Together they planted their five-hectare estate in Legana from scratch in 2018, certified organic, at a density of 6,500 vines per hectare – a figure that says everything about how seriously they take the vineyard as the foundation of the wine. The range spans pinot noir, chardonnay, syrah, riesling and a fumé sauvignon blanc across two tiers – the White Label and the Black Label estate range – with a growing experimental program of Swiss varieties imported by Matthias himself. Their ‘Roter Satz’ field blend won the Danger Zone trophy at the 2024 Young Gun of Wine Awards, with Winemaker’s Choice following in the same ceremony – only the third time in the competition’s history a winemaker has won two trophies at the same awards.
NSW/ACT, Riverina
Finalist
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
New South Wales’s Riverina region cops a bit of a bad rap from wine lovers. The second-largest wine region in Australia in terms of volume, its 17,000 hectares under vine pump out 15% of the country’s wine grapes every year, nearly all of which get turned into mass-market wines such as the infamous Yellow Tail. With the exception of a handful of quality-minded producers such as R. Paulazzo, and some innovative projects from larger-scale growers like Calabria Family Wines (who are experimenting with Mediterranean varieties better suited to the region’s climate) and De Bortoli (whose famous Noble One botrytis wine comes from Riverina fruit), the region is generally seen as a wasteland in terms of fine wine. It’s a perception that Peter Valeri’s Via Pola project is trying its utmost to rewrite. With just two wines under its belt – a fiano and a montepulciano, both of which made their debut in vintage 2024 – it has already established itself as one of the most exciting new projects from the region in decades.
Hunter Valley
2026 Finalist
2025 Finalist
2020 Finalist
Angus Vinden is a viticulturist who makes wine, not the other way around – a distinction he draws deliberately and maintains religiously. Based in Pokolbin at the family estate his parents Guy and Sandra established in 1990, Vinden now farms two vineyard sites across 13 grape varieties, operates three labels, and makes every wine from fruit he grows himself. Vinden Wines is the heritage label, rooted in classic Hunter styles. The Vinden Headcase is his more progressive expression – lighter, more textural, more experimental, drawing on the Hunter’s own pioneering tradition of elegant, medium-bodied reds rather than the heavier international styles that briefly dominated. A third label, Lignée, is a limited annual collaboration with Will Gilbert of Gilbert Family Wines in Mudgee. Across all three, the philosophy is the same: minimal intervention, wild fermentation, and the vineyard doing the heavy lifting.
Heathcote, Mornington Peninsula
2026 Finalist
2023 Finalist
2022 Finalist
2021 Finalist
Vino Intrepido is a natural continuation for James Scarcebrook’s long-term connection with Italian wine, from fine-wine retail and extensive wine-focused travel to wholesaling some of Italy’s best wines. His range, which was launched in 2016 with two wines, has grown to include a suite of Italian varieties — sangiovese, nebbiolo, fiano, nero d’avola, greco, negroamaro and montepulciano among them. The grapes are all sourced from Victorian vineyards, then made in a way that takes inspiration from traditional Italian methods but is carefully tuned to be sympathetic to the natural expression of individual sites and seasons.
McLaren Vale
2026 Finalist
Ashleigh Seymour spent more than a decade making wine at Avignonesi – Italy’s largest biodynamic estate in Montepulciano, Tuscany – before Covid, young children and the pull of home brought her back to Australia in 2021. After several years as winemaker at McLaren Vale biodynamic pioneer Paxton Wines, she launched her own label, Vino Selvatico, from the 2023 vintage: two wines, a McLaren Vale grenache and a fiano, made from organically and biodynamically farmed fruit with spontaneous fermentation, minimal sulphur, no fining, and a sensibility shaped by two continents. The name means wild wine. The wines live up to it.
Barossa Valley
2026 Finalist
Marcus Torzi was 21 years old and still completing his Bachelor of Viticulture and Oenology at the University of Adelaide when he launched Whispers of Chaos – already making two of the most quietly arresting wines to come out of the Barossa Valley in recent memory. The label debuted in August 2025 from the family farm at Mt McKenzie with two wines: a roussanne, riesling and semillon white blend, and a sangiovese and cabernet sauvignon red. Both are unfined, unfiltered and made with Italian stoneware as the primary maturation vessel. Both have a delicacy and lift that feel like a deliberate, considered answer to the questions the Barossa is currently asking itself. In a region wrestling with its own identity, Torzi’s project is less a debut label than a signpost.
Riverland, Bendigo
2026 Finalist
Tom Morrison came to winemaking through a vineyard gate on the Bellarine Peninsula in 2017, and has never quite looked back. Wilkie Wines, launched from the 2021 vintage and made in a small facility on a hill overlooking Bacchus Marsh, is a solo operation drawing fruit from Geelong, Heathcote, Bendigo and the Riverland – a range that spans skin-contact whites, chilled reds, pét-nats and more serious structured wines, unified by a preference for wild fermentation, minimal intervention and a refusal to filter. Every label carries a painting by his cousin Kate Lewis – artwork drawn from shared family life – and the whole project is named for their grandmother, Wilkie. The result is a label with a distinctly personal warmth and a winemaking sensibility that is restless, curious and increasingly confident.
Barossa Valley, Eden Valley
2026 Finalist
Alexey Doumbouya is a winemaker at Yalumba whose path to the Barossa runs through Israel, Argentina, Serbia, Italy, France, South Africa, Hungary and Washington DC before arriving at the University of Adelaide for a Master’s in Viticulture and Oenology. Since joining Yalumba in 2022, he has taken responsibility for a broad portfolio across the Samuel’s Collection and premium ranges – including the Eden Valley Chardonnay, Eden Valley Roussanne and Galway Vintage Shiraz – with the Vat-11 Grenache, sourced from a 58-year-old dry-grown vineyard on the Barossa Valley floor in the Marananga sub-region, his most personal creation, and The Virgilius Viognier, grown in Eden Valley from a vineyard first planted in 1980, a prestigious stewardship he has inherited and is now shaping. The Vat-11, notably, does not undergo malolactic fermentation, a deliberate choice that sets it apart from nearly every other red wine in the Barossa and gives it a brightness and precision that is very much Doumbouya’s signature. Both wines are made with wild fermentation, minimal intervention, and an emphasis on letting the vineyard do the talking.
Please sign in or create account as candidate to bookmark this job
Please sign in or create account to save this search
Please sign in or create account as candidate to create a resume
