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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
