Sparkling wines made only from pinot meunier are a relative rarity here in Australia – but this elegant, detailed, and delicious wine makes a compelling argument that they should be more common. Roll over, pinot noir – and tell chardonnay the news.
Sparkling wines made only from pinot meunier are a relative rarity here in Australia – but this elegant, detailed, and delicious wine makes a compelling argument that they should be more common. Roll over, pinot noir – and tell chardonnay the news.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone loves a comeback story, and with Pare Wine, Ansel Ashby is proving himself to be the Rocky Balboa of the South Australian wine scene. After having to shutter his first label, Gatch Wines, Ashby has returned with Pare – a new label in collaboration with wine merchant Andrew Williams. As the name suggests, Pare’s approach is all about minimalism, with their first release consisting of a compact collection of three single-site wines – two grenaches and a chardonnay –drawn from Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale. Winemaking is minimal-intervention, allowing the fruit and terroir to speak clearly. With Pare, Ashby is proving that less is definitely more.
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.
Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to help articulate what makes something special – and Marcell Kustos of Lvdo Wines (pronounced ‘ludo’) has more than enough fresh angles from which to approach the subject of Australian wine. Born in Hungary to a family of viticulturists and winemakers, his formal education is in food technology and wine science, and his professional background is as a sommelier and wine director at some of Australia’s most lauded fine dining destinations (including Restaurant Botanic and Penfolds Magill Estate). He brings these perspectives to bear in the making of his Lvdo Wines label – a collection of four core wines (white, red, rosé and orange/amber) and some one-off project wines that pay homage to the great wines of Australia, with an outsider’s twist. Equally at home analysing Brix levels in must as he is selling his wines to the restaurant trade, Lvdo Wines demonstrates that Kustos is an unlikely renaissance man with new and interesting things to say about Australian wine.
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