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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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