First and foremost, this is a massive thank you being with us this year as we’ve celebrated a pretty significant milestone: CellarHand’s 20th Anniversary. This is also our opportunity to wish you the best for the festive season, with a chance to spend some hugely happy times with those who mean the most to you. In honour of this send-off to 2019, we’ve put together a list of 20 wines that’ve moved us in our 20th year – wines to toast your accomplishments this year…

Jancis Robinson, the world's most revered wine writer, made a whistle-stop visit to Australia in spring 2019. She came to attend a Chardonnay symposium in the Yarra Valley, promote the eighth edition of the World Atlas of Wine and discuss the range of glassware she co-created with British product designer Richard Brendon. During her trip she spent a couple of days in Sydney and Melbourne with CellarHand, signing books and tasting a range of wines from our portfolio to showcase her universal glass. She also…

We're heading into the festive season and there's a fittingly epic amount of good wine to celebrate in this month's missive. We have three A-list annual releases from Victoria from Wantirna Estate, Mount Mary and By Farr. Getting in on that action is Tasmanian biodynamic star Stefano Lubiana and its three 2017 single-block Pinots. Another cool-climate kid - Shadowfax - is celebrating twin-gold success for a pair of Pinots at the Royal Melbourne Wine Awards, at the same time as releasing the 2017 Little Hampton…

This release is your last chance be able to tell the inevitable bandwagon-jumpers: I was into Wantirna Estate before they got big. Because they’ve expanded - or didn’t you hear? After decades of huffing and puffing, banging heads and tripping over each other in the cramped ‘70s-built winery, they knocked up a new little annexe in time for vintage 2019. When this Yarra pioneer set out, there was no real template for the small-batch winery. The gravity-fed set-up that materialised was all very well but…

KOOMILYA - A DEDICATION by Stephen Pannell After working 39 vintages, including nine in Europe, I've spent plenty of time in vineyards and wineries to ponder: Why do I love wine? Why do I love making wine? What is it exactly that makes a great wine? I think that all great wines obey a set of rules, and the most important of these is that wine should have a sense of place; the best possible expression of where they are from. Put simply, a wine…

The relatively cool 2017 season was a wonderful one in the Yarra Valley – and one that played perfectly into the deft hands of the Middleton family, whose striving for supremely elegant wines of beguiling detail knows no bounds. We’ve enjoyed a string of excellent vintages from this icon of the Yarra. It’s possible that this is the most effortless the four famous wines have ever appeared. They will delight those fortunate enough to get their hands on them – either now or far into…

This complex geology imparts a depth and multitude of textures to the resultant wine, a delicious and sumptuous potpourri of sour cherry, strawberry, damson plum, five-spice and lilac... Delicious. Balletic and verging on effortless. - Halliday Wine Companion on ’16 RP All of us who’ve penned a tasting note in our time will have gone OTT at some point, hosing the purple prose over a bottle worthy of a more sober conclusion. But great growers on great sites – and Australia for sure has its fair…

Refining nature is what it’s all about at Stefano Lubiana. During the course of 30 years since setting themselves up on the banks of the Derwent River, Steve and Monique have never wavered in their quest for ever higher quality. They’ve continued to raise the bar through painstaking organic viticulture and cutting-edge cellar technology and practices. These single-block Pinot Noir wines are the prime example of their microscopic attention in the vineyard; this is the culmination of three decades of devotion. The three plots –…

Congratulations to the Smith Cullam family of Frankland Estate. This organic pioneer – long celebrated as one of Australia’s finest Riesling producers –took out three trophies at the 2019 Royal Melbourne Wine Awards, including highly prestigious Trevor Mast Trophy for Best Shiraz. The win, taking in trophies for Best Organic Wine and Best WA Shiraz, is the culmination of 30 years of devoted work here, first by Barrie Smith and Judi Cullam in planting the vineyard and setting a determined course towards elegance and depth in…

Massive congratulations to Gen & Rob Mann, whose Corymbia Tempranillo/Malbec/Cabernet blend has just been named inaugural Wine of the Year at the Western Australian Good Food Guide  awards. There's a lot of fantastic wine grown in WA, and it's a huge credit to the Mann family to take out this award. It's hardly come out of the blue, though. The Mann has long been tied to pioneering brilliance out west, with Rob's grandfather Jack famously working 51 consecutive vintages at Houghton. Rob's dad Tony planted the Swan…

We're starting to feel those first tingles of the sunny season as this latest missive goes out to the wine-loving universe. Exciting time to be picking up a glass of something fresh - like the wine leading the domestic headlines this week, the 2017 Pinot Noir from the buzzy, beautiful, biodynamic home vineyard belonging to Central Otago's Burn Cottage. That's winemaker Claire Mulholland pictured above, taken from her recent trip to the east coast. She had a blast, and so did those who tried the…

A new screw-capped Pinot Blanc is a handy addition to a fullish and utterly idiosyncratic range from the brilliant Dominik Sona of Koehler-Ruprecht. This is joined by a new vintage of the village Riesling, while the inclusion of our first Spätlese Trocken from Saumagen means we now have four ‘tiers’ of Riesling from this phenomenal limestone-dominant vineyard. The vintage depth is pretty cool, too; these wines are exceptionally long-lived, with mind-boggling complexity building over time. 2017 Koehler-Ruprecht Pinot Blanc RRP $33 Some fresh-nut character, as…

“From one of the most beautiful, biodynamic-farmed vineyards on earth,” wrote Mike Bennie in the introduction to his review of last year’s Riesling / Grüner release from Burn Cottage. It really is a slice of heaven. Looks aren’t everything when it comes to wine, of course, but there are some places that cast a spell. If you’re lucky, the divine surroundings where grapes grow are matched by exquisite wines – wines that leave you with the impression that you’ve basked in all that beauty. Burn…

We’re into the second year of our partnership with Joe and Lou Holyman, the wonderful Tamar Valley complement to the Derwent Valley wines of Stefano Lubiana. For this pretty much one-couple show – Joe has a part-timer helping in the vineyard, but that’s it – it’s become a multi-faceted release, albeit with most of the wines appearing in minuscule quantities. There’s a range of vintages on show, too. Long, cool 2017 will go down as one of the great harvests, Joe reckons. Slighter warmer ’18,…

 “The style here is pure and understated, minimal wood influence meaning that it is the grapes — and the climats that shape them — that are front and centre at all times.” This was the summary from Wine Advocate’s William Kelley in delivering his latest report from the Matrot family. It’s right on the money and points to the no-nonsense common sense of Elsa and Adèle Matrot: When you’re lucky enough to have old vines sitting in the best sites of Meursault and Puligny, why…