Jin Maekawa

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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.

The Australian wine conversation has spent the better part of a decade moving in one direction: lighter, fresher, alternative varieties, minimal intervention, away from the dense, extracted styles that defined an earlier era. It is a necessary correction, and much of it has produced genuinely exciting wine. But corrections have a way of becoming their own orthodoxy, and there is something quietly subversive about a young, internationally minded winemaker arriving on the Limestone Coast and deciding that what interests him most is sangiovese, cabernet sauvignon and shiraz – the latter two of which are the very varieties the industry has been busiest moving away from. Not because he hasn’t noticed the shift, but because he sees something in these regions and varieties that the shift has left underexplored. “Cabernet is back baby,” he says, with the kind of conviction that tends to be right about five years before everyone else catches up.

Maekawa took the scenic route to the Limestone Coast. Born in Osaka, raised in Bangkok, schooled internationally before landing in the United States for college, then New York, then Dubai, then Adelaide for another degree – by the time he found wine, he had already lived several lives. The pivot happened behind the bar at Bar Torino in Adelaide, somewhere between carrying plates and discovering the wine list. A near-complete WSET Diploma followed, then a move to the Southeast of South Australia, where a love of big hats, country roads and a small seaside town called Robe convinced him to stay. “When I first moved to Australia eight years ago, my friend’s family invited me to spend the summer with them in a small seaside town on the Limestone Coast called Robe,” he says. “I immediately fell in love.” He has been working at Ottelia in Coonawarra for three years, making wine under a contract arrangement that gives him access to equipment and barrel space, while Maekawa Wines takes shape alongside it.

What makes his approach distinctive is precisely what his background doesn’t give him: orthodoxy. Maekawa came to these varieties through hospitality, through the people he served – Italian wine obsessives, old retirees with remarkable cellars and terrible stories, industry professionals with the itch – rather than through formal winemaking tradition. He has no received wisdom about how Coonawarra cabernet or Padthaway sangiovese should behave, which leaves him free to approach them on their own terms. “I take inspiration from those I served,” he says. “I don’t expect my wines to be anything new and avant-garde, but I yearn for it to remind you of a great time you had.” The VDT demonstrates that instinct in practice: 80% Padthaway sangiovese blended with 20% whole-bunch Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon, made with a technique that draws on carbonic maceration – a method where whole uncrushed grapes ferment in a carbon dioxide-rich environment, producing wines with bright fruit and softened tannins – while layering it through an already-active sangiovese ferment. It is a distinctly Italian idiom applied to South Australian fruit, and it produces something that doesn’t quite sound like anything else from the region.

The Limestone Coast community has been unexpectedly welcoming for an outsider. “For being so far from a metropolitan city, it surprisingly gathers people from all sorts of backgrounds and places,” he says. “Something unexpected to a random foreign city kid that plopped into the place and industry with no real connection to it.” Sangiovese has suited the Padthaway climate well in his experience – it handles the summer heat, ripens steadily and holds its acid – but demands patience. “To get it right, you have to let it reach phenological ripeness, otherwise the tannins are quite abrasive.” In challenging years he has simply chosen not to make the wine, which is both an honest assessment of his limitations and a sign of genuine commitment to quality over output. He has also become a familiar presence at the Limestone Coast Wine Show as a judge – a natural extension of the palate trained in hospitality and sharpened by WSET study.

The label concept is personal to the point of being self-portrait: “Kid from out of town, bit outlandish, keen to learn, and generous with his personality.” Maekawa Wines is not trying to be the loudest voice in the room. But it is trying to say something true about what these regions and varieties can be when approached without the weight of expectation. And before he moves on, there is one more wine he intends to make. “I would like to make a serious Coonawarra cabernet before I leave the region,” he says. “Cabernet is back baby.”

Jin Maekawa

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