Australian Wine Delivery #3: Shipping June 2025
Australia’s vibrant wine scene continues to impress, and we’re delighted to reveal the June 2025 selection from our quarterly wine club. This shipment might just be our boldest yet, anchored by a show-stopping vintage sparkling and rounded out with a diverse and delicious mix of wines that highlight Australia’s depth, character, and innovation.
Leading the pack is Henskens Rankin Vintage Brut 2014, an ultra-limited Tasmanian sparkling wine that rivals top Champagne houses, aged for eight years on lees and worth over $100 a bottle. It sets the tone for a truly elevated box. From there, we travel to Macedon Ranges and Central Victoria for the debut of Attwoods Vin de Folie Blanc, a bright and textured white made for food and fun, and continue on to Heathcote for a fuller-bodied and deeply expressive Greco from Chalmers, grown on 550-million-year-old soils.
Our journey then detours into the unexpected with a stunning skin-contact Viognier-Marsanne-Roussanne blend from La Petite Mort, made in buried qvevri in Queensland’s Granite Belt. It’s golden, aromatic, and unlike anything you’ve ever tasted. Next, we head to McLaren Vale for a Mediterranean-spirited Mencía from Oliver’s Taranga, a juicy red that reflects the region’s experimental spirit and climate-conscious grape choices.
Finally, we round things out with Sunspell Cabernet Sauvignon, a wine developed by our very own founders, offering a joyful and unoaked expression of cabernet that speaks to sun-drenched Aussie summers and inclusivity in good winemaking.
Whether you’re in it for the bubbles, the innovation, the texture, or the sheer drinkability, our June 2025 selection is here to expand your palate and delight your senses. Join us in tasting what makes Australian wine so exciting—one glass at a time.
So what's in the third How to Drink Australian Wine Box?
Henskens Rankin Vintage Brut 2014 - Tasmania
We’re starting out with a bang on this club. This bottle alone has a $100+ value, and is (as far as we’re concerned), the best sparkling wine coming out of Australia---and it competes with Champagne that is double th e price.
Frieda Henskens and David Rankin both had a fascination with winemaking from an early age: Frieda bottling stomped grape juice on a New Zealand dairy farm and David making plum wine just outside of Melbourne at eleven years-old. They went on to (between them) have careers in sustainable agriculture, natural resource management, and statistics, but came back to wine in 2010 with the founding of their eponymous label Henskens Rankin. They had just two tons of elite Pinot Noir and Chardonnay fruit in the beginning, crafting a vintage brut that was only released in 2018. In their ten years as a winery, they have only released five wines (!!): a Brut Rosé, a Blanc de Blancs, and the 2010, 2011, and 2014 Vintage Bruts. To say their business is defined by small production and a long, detailed process is an understatement.
The 2014 Vintage Brut is 70% Chardonnay and 30% Pinot Noir. The fruit is carefully sourced from vineyards that David and Frieda have relationships with, mainly on the Tasman Peninsula and the Coal River Valley--all the vineyards are at least 30 years old, and David and Frieda seek out growers who have the same painstaking approach that they do. The base wines see some neutral barrel aging and partial malolactic fermentation. Made in the Champagne method, the wine is aged 8 years on lees (!!), with just 2 g/L dosage at bottling.
The nose demonstrates lees and bottle age with a roasted hazelnut and marzipan character, but stays remarkably fresh-fruited, with notes of lemon oil, white flowers, and red-fruited kurrajong (a nutty native Australian fruit). The palate is refined and bright, with a fine but soft bead, striking acidity, and a long finish. Only 1560 bottles were made of this wine and each bottle is individually numbered.
Food pairings: If there ever was a caviar wine, this is it. A perfect aperitif, but also great with rich seafood preparations, like butter-poached lobster and seared scallops. Also good for off-the-beaten-path Champagne pairings, like fried chicken and movie-style popcorn.
Attwoods Vin de Folie Blanc 2024 - Macedon Ranges + Central Victoria
This wine is brand new to the country, and you are the first people we wanted to see it, dear wine club members! We’ve worked with the single vineyard chardonnays and pinot noirs from Attwoods for a few years now, and we continue to feel that they are some of the most compelling examples of those grapes being made in Australia. But they’re also -- as small production, hand-crafted wines tend to be -- quite expensive. Attwoods wanted to create a wine that (though still hand-crafted and small-production--only 350 cases made) would be more accessible. Enter: Vin de Folie. There’s a red and a white under the label, and they’re both fresh, bright, food-friendly wines meant to be drunk young.
To back up a bit on Attwoods, it is a family winery owned by Troy and Jane Walsh. Though Troy is Australian-born, he started his wine career as a sommelier in some of London’s top restaurants. His passion for wine led him to working in Burgundy, France for renowned pinot noir producers Domaine de L’Arlot and Domaine David Duband. Troy returned to Australia and established Attwoods with his wife Jane in 2010, with a goal to showcase the greatness of the country’s pinot noir and chardonnay. The philosophy of Attwoods centers on making wine that is food-focused, minimal intervention, reflective of vintage, and staying true to the idea that “without great risk, you cannot achieve great rewards.” That risk includes growing grapes in marginal climates that are labor intensive to farm.
The 2024 Vin de Folie Blanc is 60% Chardonnay and 40% Pinot Gris, sourced both from Attwoods’ estate vineyard in Macedon Ranges, as well as a few other vineyards in Central Victoria. Made in a slightly oxidative style, reminiscent of some wines from Mâcon, Beaujolais (blanc) and the Jura, Vin de Folie blanc leads with a nose of fresh orchard fruit, toasted wattleseed, heady lilies, ginger, and button mushroom. The wine is fresh but textural with a long, acid driven finish.
Food pairings: You can go as light and fresh as a simple salad with this wine, but it will also stand up to some more pungent flavors and intense textures. We especially love mushrooms and nuttiness with this wine. A tarte flambee with hazelnuts and morels? Yes, please.
Chalmers Greco 2022 - Heathcote, Victoria
If you’ve been with us since the first wine club shipment, you’ve already had an introduction to the Chalmers family. The Red Blend from their original vineyard, the Mother Block, was featured in that box. We’ll repeat a bit of what we’ve told you about Chalmers to get to the story of Heathcote vineyard, which is probably the best site to grow Italian grapes in Australia.
While the Mother Block came first, it was originally only used for the nursery and growing business. The Chalmers family was at the forefront of importing and growing Mediterranean grapes to Australia, but winemaking wasn’t a part of the business yet. The Chalmers family knew that they had to find the perfect site - the grand cru of Italian grapes - to really show the Australian wine industry (and the world) that Australia was capable of making world-class wines from Italian grapes. It took them years to find it, but they finally found the perfect site (in the late 90s) in the northern hills of Heathcote, about a two-hour drive north of Melbourne. They planted along an east-facing slope, running from 150 to 170 meters in elevation, on the famous Cambrian soils of Heathcote--550 million year old iron-rich volcanics.
Here, they’re able to create wines of incredible nuance, complexity, concentration, and freshness. The Greco is typically the smallest production of their varietal wines from Heathcote--only 200 cases were made of the 2022 vintage. A fuller bodied style of the grape, with balancing texture and acidity. Ripe apple, poached quince, and fresh nectarine on the nose, with a toasted wattleseed nuttiness on the palate, combined with saline minerality and juicy, broad fruit. Pithy and mouthwatering, bold and concentrated.
Food pairings: Hearty seafood preparations are our favorite with this wine. Grilled swordfish with lemon zest and olive tapenade, ocean trout with capers and pine nuts, any paella preparation--this wine can handle it all.
La Petite Mort VMR Qvevri 2019 - Granite Belt, Queensland
Don’t be deterred by the color of this wine -- with 161 days spent on skins, this wine is about as golden in color as they come. But the three guys behind La Petite Mort work really hard to make sure this wine isn’t a simple and ‘funky’ entrant into the skin-contact category, but a serious and complex expression of Queensland viognier, marsanne, and roussanne.
Queensland you say!? Queensland is more known for the Great Barrier Reef than it is for wine, but we think that’s due for a change. Just on the other side of the Great Dividing Range from tropical beachfront lies one of the most exciting wine regions in all Australia: the Granite Belt. Cool, high, and sunny, the Granite Belt is a wine region at the edges: cacti break out from under granite bedrock, which is so reflective that the tourism website recommends you wear at least an SPF 50 at all times. (As an FYI, La Petite Mort’s wines tend to be labeled ‘South Eastern Australia’ because, in addition to their estate vineyard in the Granite Belt, they work with a couple neighboring vineyards that happen to fall over the border in New South Wales.)
When you get to know Glen Robert, Andrew Scott, and Robert Richter, it’s no surprise that they’ve chosen this unlikely region as their home. The trio developed La Petite Mort to be “unusual, confronting, and a little left of center” allowing them to experiment with new varieties and styles. They created their own Qvevri farm, stocked with 14 clay vessels buried underground. Qvevri-aging and skin contact (well over 100 days for most wines) are the hallmarks of their style, combined with their signature spirit of experimentation and collaboration.
Instead of defusing varietal character -- which sometimes happens with ‘orange wine’ -- the skin contact here amplifies it. The wine smells of ripe apricot, fresh quandong (an Australian red peach), toasted bunya bunya nut (a giant pine nut native to Queensland), gardenia, jasmine, and button mushrooms. The mouthfeel is rich and supple, but balanced, with moderate alcohol and a pleasantly bitter finish. We’ve blind-tasted wine-industry folks on this wine (in a black glass, so they can’t see the color!), and a number have called it Condrieu, France’s top appellation for viognier.
Food pairings: This wine works incredibly well with salty, cured meats. A veal saltimbocca (Veal! Prosciutto! Sage!) is superb with this wine. It’s also very VERY good with smoked things. Instead of sparkling wine at your next smoked salmon brunch, try this wine, and expect your mind to be blown.
Oliver’s Taranga Mencía 2023 - McLaren Vale, South Australia
We are curators of this wine club, but we are also importers of Australian wine. Up until this moment, we’ve used wines that we import for this club: we know they’re great. But we want to make sure we showcase the best of Australia, no matter who imports it, and the story of Oliver’s Taranga is an important one.
In 1994, Oliver’s Taranga released its first estate-bottled and branded wine after six generations of grape growing in McLaren Vale. Their 100-hectare, 180-year-old estate sits in the middle of McLaren Vale’s Seaview region, with plantings of everything from shiraz, grenache and cabernet sauvignon to mencía, white frontignac and fiano. Oliver’s Taranga still sells grapes – to the likes of such luminaries as d’Arenberg, Penfolds, Wirra Wirra and Seppeltsfield – and only makes wine from their own estate grapes. Corrina Wright is the winemaker and director of her family’s winery, navigating the terrain as new makers but old growers to great success.
This is also our first McLaren Vale wine in the club, and tells an important story about McLaren Vale. Though the region is planted to over 60% shiraz and grenache, McLaren Vale has long been a supporter of ‘alternative’ grape varieties, which can probably be better expressed as ‘more climate appropriate’ grape varieties. Long gone is the fallacy that the ‘noble grapes’ (i.e., chardonnay, riesling, sauvignon blanc, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon and merlot) are the only ones that can properly transmit their place. In fact, it’s the opposite belief that many vintners across Australia hold, instead looking to find and plant the exact grape (however obscure) that best suits a site--and McLaren Vale is at the forefront of this movement.‘It’s probably the region with the most experimental varieties in the entire country,’ Corrina Wright says proudly – and certainly the one with such an established brand already. Many regions across Australia that fetch good money for their signature grapes don’t stray, but in McLaren Vale, straying has become the signature.
So we present: Oliver’s Taranga Mencía, a grape originally from the western Spain, primarily Bierzo and Ribeira Sacra. Oliver’s Taranga’s version has the dusty spice and savory briar of its Iberian counterpart, but with an added level of dark cherry fruit and soft, juicy tannins. This wine delivers plenty of interest to contemplate, but is an equally easy, delicious sip.
Food pairings: This wine is certainly one of the more versatile in this box, pairing wise. Why not go with the Mediterranean inspiration though, and think about everything from chorizo with baked tomatoes to lamb kebabs with morello sauce. And it’s light on its feet enough to work heartier seafood too. Paella again? Why not.
Sunspell Cabernet Sauvignon 2022 - South Australia
Sunspell was developed by How to Drink Australian founders Jane Lopes and Jonathan Ross. During our travels down under, we saw firsthand that Australia not only produced wine that much of the world has yet to see, but that it was done with respect for both the environment and for the community—and a sense of fun and lightness. Sunspell is a celebration of all those things we think of when we think of Australia: pristine sun-drenched beaches, big surf, fun-loving people. And it’s a celebration of all those things that don’t come to mind enough when thinking of Australia: fair labor, sensible farming, and delicious wine.
Sunspell is a collaboration with two winemakers in Australia, who hunt down the best cabernet sauvignon vineyard sites and craft them into this fresh, unoaked style of cabernet sauvignon. Sunspell perfectly captures the high-UV environment that makes Australia so special, allowing for grapes to achieve full flavor-ripeness at lower alcohol levels and optimum freshness, with none of the perils that typically afflict affordable cabernet sauvignon, like oak chips and coloring.
We believe that everyone deserves to drink good wine, and Sunspell is an affordable wine for everyone!
The nose is a combination of bright and juicy red and black fruits – quandong (a native red peach), black plum, and red currant, as well as subtle savory notes like green pepper, fern, and river mint. The palate belies the bright ruby color, with a fullness and roundness of dark fruit. Acid is bright and tannins are supple, creating a soft finish. The perfect summer cabernet.
Food pairings: There is not a better burger wine on the planet. Fight us.