Picking Wines for a Subscription Box

My friend Matt runs Killa Plonk (opens in new tab), a wine subscription service, and he invited me along to a trade tasting to help him choose what to put in his boxes. I said yes mostly for selfish reasons. A trade tasting is where importers and producers show their new releases to the people who buy wine for a living, and it is the fastest way I know to taste a season's worth of current releases in one sitting.

It was held at the InterContinental in Melbourne, in a long room with producers and their representatives standing behind tables. It was less crowded than the Saturday tastings I usually write about, and the pace was different. I got through eighty-three wines in about three hours, which is roughly two minutes each, and by the end my palate was gone.

This post is the filter. Every price below is the producer's own, taken from their website rather than from a shop, and three of the wines I liked are imported, so their producer price is set in another currency and I have left those figures out.

What Matt was looking for

The brief was narrow and sensible. Australian only, affordable, well made, and delivering value rather than prestige. We tasted well beyond it, because you may as well when the wines are open, so what follows splits into the wines that answer the brief and the ones I would buy for myself regardless.

On the brief

Ox Hardy Blewitt Springs Fiano, $30

Good texture and properly built, which is more than most whites at this price manage. It was the only Fiano in the room, so I cannot tell you it beat its rivals, but it did not need to.

Chaffey Bros, $25 to $80

These are the wines I have been seeing everywhere lately, and now I understand why. Their Evangeline took Best in Show at the Decanter World Wine Awards in 2024, they hold Decanter's World's Best Shiraz and World's Best GSM, and Not Your Grandma's Rosé was named Rosé of the Year in Australia by The Real Review this year.

My own order ran the other way to the trophies. The Battle For Barossa "La Résistance!", a Grenache Syrah Mourvèdre at $30, was the best of them for me, ahead of the Evangeline at $45 and the Elijah at $80.

Freycinet Riesling, $37

I am not an Australian Riesling drinker as a rule, and their Riesling at $37 changed my mind for the afternoon. I preferred it to their Chardonnay at $46 and to the Louis Pinot Noir at $43, and the Louis is a good wine in its own right.

Bleasdale, three of them

The Wild Fig at $22, a Shiraz Grenache Mourvèdre, the Second Innings Malbec at $23, and the Generations Malbec at $39. I want to take them together because they are one producer's range and I nearly dismissed all three on sight. They held their ground, and the Wild Fig was the cheapest red poured all day and beat wines at twice its price.

Primo Estate Zamberlan, $42

A Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese blend with very big tannins that work with the wine rather than against it. At $42 it stretches the brief on price, and I would still put it in the box.

Beyond the brief

The best Pinot Gris came from New Zealand

Seven Pinot Gris were poured and the two I liked best were the Ata Rangi and the Valli, both from New Zealand. Australian Pinot Gris is a category I am usually disappointed by, and this room did nothing to change that. Both New Zealanders had real structure with good fruit behind it.

Valli, and why they are not on my list

The Valli wines never disappoint me. I have had them several times, and I left the range out of my picks for that reason rather than on merit, which is worth admitting rather than pretending the list is neutral.

Contacto Alvarinho, from Portugal

A textural white from Mendes and Symington, unlike anything else that was open all afternoon. The importer told me he had very little of it.

The wines of the show

Dalrymple, from northern Tasmania. I came across them a few weeks earlier at a Prince Wine Store tasting, where their Pinot Meunier was the only Australian wine in a room of European bottles and earned its place. Here they poured their single-site wines, and the Pipers River Chardonnay at $52 and the Pipers River Pinot Noir at $80 were the best two things I tasted all day.

Neither is anywhere near Matt's brief, and I am including them because the question a tasting like this answers is not only what is cheap. Their Coal River Valley Pinot Noir costs exactly the same $80 as the Pipers River and I liked it a good deal less, which tells you the site is doing the work rather than the price.

The shortlist

If you want that kind of filtering done for you on an ongoing basis, my 60-second quiz reads your palate from the styles you already drink and matches you to bottles I have tasted and rated myself.