This report covers a host of great Australian and New Zealand producers unveiling their new wines over the past two months: the astoundingly great Swinney Farvie wines from the stellar 2023 vintage; likewise, the Corymbia new release 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon - a new benchmark of potential in Margaret River; Fraser Gallop’s new ultra-premium Cabernet wine; and a single-vineyard Swinging Bridge Chardonnay from high-altitude Orange in New South Wales that fairly bowled me over in its cool sophistication. New kid on the block Eddie McDougall is not new at all, but the suite of super-premium single-vineyard wines under his eponymous label are, and I was lucky enough to be the first to see these wines-brilliantly eloquent wines that harness the old vineyards in McLaren Vale and Margaret River and expresses them in mostly seasoned French puncheons, the older, larger-format oak encouraging the fruit to enunciate its sense of place (and doing so with great sophistication).

From New Zealand, the new release single-block Pinots from Central Otago’s Felton Road may represent their best yet,and the Villa Maria single-vineyard wines tasted with group winemaker David Roper, all the way from Marlborough, New Zealand, to here in Fremantle, Western Australia.

In all the tasting that occurs over the year, there are single-producer focus articles, verticals, vineyard deep-dives,regional overviews, varietally based investigations and exciting new releases, but where do the great wines that are released each week go-brilliant wines that are either delivered at times where they don’t “fit in” to reports under construction or are just too good to hang around and wait for the next one?

Here, monthly, I will be releasing as many notes as possible under a “new releases” umbrella, which will encompass wines from both New Zealand and Australia.

- ERIN LARKIN