The Cellar Door Podcast

Send us Fan Mail There are wine regions that the world knows by name, and there are wine regions that deserve to be known a whole lot better. Frankland River, tucked away in Western Australia’s Great Southern, is one of the latter. It’s a region with a rich agricultural history, a distinctive climate, some seriously exciting wines, and a community of producers working hard to put their corner of t...

Send us Fan Mail The wine industry is cyclical. Booms become busts. Shortages become oversupply. Prices rise, vineyards get planted, markets change, and suddenly everyone is asking: how did we get here? But perhaps the more important question is: did we see it coming? In this conversation, Toby Langley and I unpack the Turrentine Wine Business Wheel of Fortune, and what it tells us about supply, d...

Send us Fan Mail I’ve spoken to Giles Cooke before on the Cellar Door Podcast, usually about his successful Thistledown. But this conversation is a little different. I must warn listeners that some of the themes in this conversation are heavy, including loss, mental health and suicide.  Behind Giles’s Our Fathers label is a story that I found genuinely moving. It’s a wine project that came out of...

Send us Fan Mail What makes a wine business worth buying? You might think it's the vineyard. Or the winery. Maybe it's the brand, the wine sitting in the cellar, or the customers who have been buying it for generations. But what if one of the biggest things affecting the value of a wine business is actually the person who owns it? To answer these questions I reached out to Toby Langley o...

Send us Fan Mail For Mac Forbes, wine has never been just about what’s in the glass. It’s about identity. Place. Curiosity. And the willingness to choose the harder path in pursuit of something meaningful. Over the past two decades, Mac has built one of Australia’s most respected wine businesses by questioning convention—from dry farming and single vineyards to a philosophy centred on understandin...

Send us Fan Mail Most conversations about wine start with a simple assumption: that there is such a thing as the wine market. Joe Fattorini argues that's completely wrong. In this episode, we unpack why treating wine as a single market leads to poor marketing, poor positioning, and missed opportunities. Drawing on examples from around the world, Joe explains why the most successful wine busin...

Send us Fan Mail For most wine drinkers, a wine show is something that happens in the background. A medal on a bottle. A trophy announced at an awards dinner. A score that helps guide a purchasing decision. But behind those medals sits one of the most important institutions in Australian wine. This year, the Sydney Royal Wine Show celebrates an extraordinary milestone: 200 years since wine was fir...

Send us Fan Mail This episode welcomes back Ed Cavanagh — wine writer, historian, policy researcher, and author of the forthcoming book Crushed: The Hand of Government on the Australian Wine Industry. Ed has spent the last several years digging into the policies, regulations, and market forces that have shaped Australian wine, and his latest paper examines the controversial topic of : ghost labels...

Send us Fan Mail For many wineries, making great wine is only half the challenge. The other half is getting that wine into the hands of consumers. Behind every bottle that finds its way onto a restaurant wine list, an independent retailer's shelf, or a national distribution network sits a commercial relationship that most wine drinkers never see. And when those relationships work well, they c...

Send us Fan Mail For centuries, France has occupied a unique place in the world of wine. Its vineyards, classifications, language, and traditions have shaped how we think about fine wine, from Bordeaux and Burgundy to concepts like terroir and appellation. But how did French wine come to dominate the global imagination? And was that dominance really built on superior wine, or on something else ent...

Send us Fan Mail For more than four decades, Charles Melton has been one of the defining voices of the Barossa Valley. His journey stretches from the wine glut of the 1980s, through the rise of modern Australian wine, to the creation of one of the country's most recognisable labels. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down at the Charles Melton winery on Krondorf Road with Charles Melton a...

Send us Fan Mail Wine is full of simple stories. Old vines are better than young vines. Great vineyards are all about terroir. Climate determines quality. Pick the right variety, put it in the right place, and the rest takes care of itself. They're neat stories. They're marketable stories. According to this week's guest, they're also dangerously incomplete. Dylan Grigg is one o...

Send us Fan Mail In Part 1 of my conversation with wine industry commentator, producer, and recovering wine critic Robert Joseph, we explored a deceptively simple question: where do wineries actually make their money? But that conversation quickly led to a much bigger one. What happens when the traditional wine business model comes under pressure? In this second part, we move beyond profitability...

Send us Fan Mail For a long time, the wine industry has sold itself on romance. The rolling vineyard. The family story. The passionate winemaker chasing perfection in a bottle. But behind every bottle of wine is something far more complicated: a business model. And right now, many of those models are under enormous pressure. In this conversation, Robert Joseph returns to The Cellar Door Podcast to...

Send us Fan Mail Over the last year, while speaking with people across the Australian wine industry, one name kept unexpectedly coming up in conversation in connection with the Queensland market, not a winemaker, not a sommelier, but a lawyer. Today’s guest is Travis Schultz, founder of Travis Schultz & Partners, philanthropist, wine writer, and someone who has quietly built some of Queensland...

Send us Fan Mail Late last year I had the pleasure of speaking with Pipa Nielson who gave an exciting and colourful introduction to the Western Australian region of Geographe wine region. Following that first course in Geographe education, Pipa arranged a second: a conversation with wine rockstar, Kim Horton, of Willow Bridge Estate. After growing up in the Swan Valley, Kim has made wine across mu...

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Send us Fan Mail To borrow from Monty Python: now for something completely different. This episode steps away from the usual B2B conversations and industry stories, and into something I don’t usually focus on… wine tasting. When a mystery box of wine appeared on my doorstep, filled with a collection of genuinely exotic and intriguing bottles, I did what anyone would do: I tracked down the sender....

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Send us Fan Mail The Hunter Valley occupies a special place in the story of Australian wine. It is, in many ways, the spiritual birthplace of the industry - a region where generations of families have wrestled with the climate, the soil, and the vagaries of the market to produce wines of remarkable character. My guest today, Garth Eather, represents one of those families. Garth is the co-founder o...

Send us Fan Mail Australian wine once rode a remarkable wave of success in the United States — built on strong personalities, passionate importers, and wines that connected with everyday drinkers. Today, the picture is more complicated. In this episode, I sit down with Chuuuuck Hayward, a 40-year veteran of the American wine trade to unpack what’s really happening on the ground in the US. We revis...

Send us Fan Mail Phil Conway embraced adventure and the unknown when he moved from Ireland to Melbourne in Australia. Phil describes a love of food from an early age, a love and passion that placed him on an inevitable collision course with wine. These passions took him across the globe while also launching him onto the set of Australia’s masterchef. Phil describes his passion for food and wine as...

Send us Fan Mail Will Taylor is one of the most insightful voices in Australian Wine - and its not hard to see why. His perspective is as unique as it is dialed in. As the managing partner of the wine group at Finlayson’s law, he spends his days analysing the aspects of the wine trade and industry that get the least attention - the least sexy aspects of the trade, that are the most important when...

Send us Fan Mail Cyndal Petty has spunk. She describes her drive and oodles of energy from an early age, her parents placing her in the gymnastics arena and her early success in it until injury caused her to pivot. But the foundations of drive and dedication had set hard, and when Cyndal found herself as an apprentice chef at age 15 years old, it was only a matter of time before she set her eyes o...

Send us Fan Mail Daniel Sangermani has embraced the challenge of bringing the prized wines of Switzerland to the sun kissed shores of Australia. Switzerland exports less than 2% of its total production but consumes the 4th most wine per person of any country in the world. Many, if not most people, particularly in Australia, have little familiarity with Switzerland's deep and historic wine cul...