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Leila Davis Foreign Friends

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  • Leila Davis

    Foreign Friends’ wines are, as the name suggests, a celebration of friendship – not just friendship in general, but more specifically the friendship that blossomed after an Australian pair of sisters, Crystal and Leila Davis, met the French Juliette Menneteau in Beechworth in 2016. The trio’s collaborative label, founded in 2023, draws on each of their strengths: Leila’s as a winemaker (she currently works for Sentiō and Sorrenberg), Crystal’s as a marketer (her day job is in advertising), and Menneteau’s in wine distribution and sales (she currently works as sales and marketing manager for Australian wine importer and distributor World Wine Estates). Crafting a tight range of six wines – three whites made from savagnin, pinot blanc, and chardonnay respectively, plus a rosé from nebbiolo and reds from gamay and barbera – delivered in whip-smart packaging, Foreign Friends presents a vibrant, youthful, and approachable take on contemporary Australian wine. But don’t let the branding fool you – behind the laid-back odes to good times are three driven, ambitious women who are working hard to raise the profile of women in wine.

  • Charles Osborne

    Wedged between the Black Summer bushfires and the pandemic pushing into full bloom, Charles Osborne pitched in and launched Dazma Wine Company, with fruit sourced from Northern Victoria. That first release consisted of three wines, a vermentino, a shiraz and a field blend of some 13 varieties – including such exotica as kerner, muscat ottonel, ehrenfelser, scheurebe, siegerrebe and rotgipfler – that were picked and fermented together. His wines are all vineyard specific, and they are all very much in the lo-fi camp, with Osborne keen to make democratically affordable and enjoyable wines.

  • Phoebe Grant

    Phoebe Grant launched Nature of the Beast barely out of here teens, unveiling a compact but serenely mature suite of wines from the 2020 vintage. Those wines were made from chardonnay and nebbiolo, a rosé, which are varieties that are the cornerstones of her family’s Beechworth vineyard, Traviarti, though grant sources fruit from the Macedon Ranges and North East Victoria. A barbera joined the ranks in 2021, with all wines made with texture and savoury interest as the mainstays.

  • Gabe O’Brien

    Cavedon Wines is the third-generation manifestation of a pioneering King Valley vineyard, with Gabe O’Brien making micro-batches of wine to celebrate the hard work of his father-in-law over 40 plus years, who helped pioneer and then revolutionise grape-growing in the region. O’Brien is starting to do the same for winemaking, introducing styles less common in the district, including skin contact on white grapes, sparkling gewürztraminer, nouveau reds and bottle fermenting prosecco to make both col fondo and zero dosage wines.

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