If you’re looking for guidance on the best wine in Australia for 2024, The Real Review Wine Classification is a great place to start.
Renowned wine writer Huon Hooke previously appeared on the Drinks Adventures podcast way back in Season One, in an episode exploring Australians’ love affair with champagne.
He’s finally back for this full-length chat about the classification, which launched in 2022 aiming to highlight the greatest wines of Australia and New Zealand that have an outstanding track record of a decade or longer.
Huon and I discuss the fresh approach he’s taken to classifying wine versus other established frameworks; and how this helps bring emerging producers to the fore, as well as wine styles and regions that might be less fashionable, but are nevertheless extremely high quality.
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Case in point, the wineries of Langhorne Creek in South Australia; Bleasdale, Lake Breeze and Bremerton.
The Real Review was launched in 2016 to provide unbiased, independent reviews on wine. I started by asking Huon whether the classification has always been on the founders’ agenda.
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Huon Hooke wine podcast interview: Full transcript
HUON HOOKE: It was never part of the original plan, no, but it’s been a growing idea that we’ve been working on for a few years now. We taste more than 10, 000 wines a year, and all of that goes into a database which is available online to subscribers. And a way of actually making more value out of this, making more use of it, is to put all those numbers into a classification.
So every year we do the top wineries thing, as you’re aware, and that’s classifying wineries. And that’s something we do once a year. We’ve been doing it for about six years now. But that classifies wineries. People are interested in individual wines as well. How do they rate? What are the great wines of Australia?
A buying guide for the consumer, a promotional aid for the producer. So it was very, reasonably easy once you’ve got that database of information, to use that to create a classification. We looked around and I’ve been aware for many years, of course, of the other classifications that do exist. I think possibly the Langton’s idea of basing it on auction performance was loosely based on the Bordeaux system because the classification of 1855 was based on market performance of the wines originally.
If there’s a wine that never comes up at auction, it’s got no chance of being in their classification. I’ve never really thought that basing it on auction performances was a good way of classifying wines. it doesn’t really speak about their quality, not directly anyway. There have been other people that have, you know, that have proposed things in books, for example.
Bob Campbell did in a book, Michael Cooper did for New Zealand in a book. but it was something that was just a once-er and wasn’t really updated. Back in 1974, Dan Murphy proposed the first Australian wine classification and he put out a little paperback book called The Wine Classification of Australia and I’ve got a copy.
But that was never updated.
JAMES ATKINSON: It’d be a collector’s item now, wouldn’t it?
HUON HOOKE: It is. I’m banking on it. But that’s a long time ago, 1974, and it was never updated. So if you look at it now, half the wines on it don’t even exist anymore. So, you know, it just brings home that you’ve got to keep these things alive.
You’ve got to keep them, dynamic. So, we upgrade ours, we update ours every year, and that’ll be ongoing, so those people who get a merit, which is a level of, you know, there are three levels of the classification, three, two, and one merit. The number of people who qualify for that will be increasing every year because the qualification is you must have at least 10 vintages of your wine that have been reviewed by us.
That’s the first step on the ladder. So there are plenty of great wines out there, as you would know, which are sitting around 7, 8, 9 vintages. And when their 10th comes out, assuming it’s a reasonable equivalent quality, they’ll be eligible to get a merit on our classification.
JAMES ATKINSON: And are a lot of these producers consistent with sending you their wines every year or has there been a process of them having to, you know, fill in some gaps with you?
HUON HOOKE: Well, before we launched the first classification, which was at the beginning of this year, we found a few gaps that were fairly significant gaps. And so we sent out messages to a lot of wineries inviting them to send in a few wines that filled in the gaps so that they could potentially qualify for a merit.
And most of the people, I think, actually took that up. So we sat down and a few of us, all of the team in fact, were involved in those tastings. And we did blind tastings with more than one person. And that contributed to the first classification, which we’ve just recently updated.
Medoc classification of 1855
JAMES ATKINSON: So maybe, looking beyond Australia globally, what are some of the most famous classifications out there and how are they managed?
HUON HOOKE: Yeah, well Bordeaux’s the Medoc classification of 1855, which is kind of old now, is the most famous classification in the world, no doubt about it. And there’s only been one change to that classification that I’m aware of, and it was Mouton Rothschild going up from second to first growth a long time ago.
If you don’t keep updating these things, they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like all of those first growth chateaus, you know, they’re over $2000 a bottle or something. They’re very, very wealthy. They plough the money back into ensuring they stay to the best wines in the region. So it perpetuates itself.
There are lots of people in Bordeaux who must look at that list with great envy and say, ‘gee, I wish I was able to charge that for my wine. I would be able to invest in vineyard and winery and improve my wine’. And that’s what they do. So that’s the Bordeaux classification. If you look at, I think the, one of the oldest, extant, classifications is Hungary, would you believe the Tokay wines of Hungary were classified.
They still have a classification system, but not many people are that aware of it, I don’t think. And if you look at vineyards, it’s another way of classifying wine and Burgundy is, and Alsace to a lesser extent, but Burgundy is probably the most famous. The area where the vineyards are classified, so you’d be aware that the best vineyards are called Grand Cru, and then the next best vineyards are Premier Cru, and the next best are, you know, Village appellations and lieux dits.
That is pretty much set in stone. It’s constantly being challenged, I think. There are people who are sitting on the outside saying, ‘Hello, you know, I think my wine’s as good as the guy across the road. Please include me in the Premier Cru’. But that’s vineyards. I mean, it’s not wines. We’re classifying individual wines here.
And people want to know, they want to know what are the great wines of Australia. Give us a list of them. If you’re involved in investing, then you want to know which of the wines to invest in. If you just want to drink the best and put them in your cellar and enjoy them yourself. There is a real need, I think, for this kind of information.
The Real Review Wine Classification of Australia
HUON HOOKE: We don’t classify wine according to its auction performance or the vineyard it comes from, or whether we like the winemaker personally or not. None of that stuff. It’s as objective as it can possibly be. So it is done on the ratings that our independent assessors give and we have four people in Australia reviewing wine, three apart from me.
We’re all independent of the industry. We all taste blind as much as we can. You can’t always taste blind, but most of it is tasted blind. It’s quality ratings of wines given by independent experts.
JAMES ATKINSON: Huon, maybe give us a bit of a picture of like how you actually go about your tasting work. How many months of the year are you working away at tasting and how do you structure your day and structure the tastings?
HUON HOOKE: That’s infinitely variable, James. It depends what else is going on. most days of the week I’ll be tasting something. When we’re going full tilt, I’ll be tasting at least a hundred wines a week. But, it’s not like that all the time. A typical day for me would be late morning to do a tasting and late morning or mid to late afternoon, I think people taste better when they’re hungry.
So if you’ve just had a big meal, you shouldn’t really do a tasting straight after that because your senses are not as sharp. If I’m not in a good mood or if I’m not particularly well, I just avoid tasting because I think that you need to be in the right frame of mind to taste fairly and objectively and, if you’re in a grumpy mood, you’re going to be grumpy to the wine.
This is not good. The whole thing with The Real Review has changed a bit. All the samples used to come to my house.
JAMES ATKINSON: I’ve been to your house before and seen the, you know, the wall of cardboard boxes as you come in.
HUON HOOKE: There you go. Well, I’ve reclaimed my house. So over a year ago, we started renting premises and redirecting all samples to those premises.
And now all of us in Sydney, the four of us in Sydney, Aaron, Stuart, myself, will go to this depot and pick up boxes. All of the samples are unpacked and sorted and entered into a database in the depot and they are put into white dozen boxes, each with an identification on it and they’re all numbered so that when we come to taste them, we can identify them just as a number.
You pull them out of the box and you either get someone else to serve them or you serve them yourself and then hide the bottles or you put bags around them or you do whatever is your system to make sure you’re not looking at the bottle while you’re tasting the wine.
This is of critical importance to us. We don’t divide Australia up into regions and allocate regions to tasters like some other people do. That’s one way of doing it. But to me, as a taster, I would find that really limiting and a bit boring because I don’t want to be stuck on just doing Margaret River or everything Western Australia and taste nothing from the eastern states.
This would be seriously limiting. Everything is random, so when I pull up at the depot in half an hour’s time, I don’t know what Glenda is going to have there for me. Whatever she has ready to go, I’ll load into the car. If it’s six dozen Rieslings, so be it, but I’ll try and vary it a little bit. You know, we all need a varied diet.
JAMES ATKINSON: And what’s the difference between the different merit levels?
HUON HOOKE: Okay, well three merits at the top, people are allowed to put a little triangular bunch of grapes with three M’s on it, if they’ve got a three merit, and only, only a handful of wineries have qualified, 36 wines, out of all of Australia qualified for three merits in the original classification, there’s two or three more that have gone up since in our revision.
The next level is two merits and then there’s one merit. It’s done on a logarithm, sorry, an algorithm. It’s a mathematical thing. It’s not something that I get too involved in. It’s done by the computer experts, the IT people.
Best wine in Australia 2024: The Real Review
JAMES ATKINSON: Now, looking at the Three Merit wines, a lot of iconic wines there that, you know, sort of no surprise, I guess, but are there any amongst that grouping that could be a bit of a surprise for people, do you think?
HUON HOOKE: Yeah, I’m sure there are. Some people were surprised there were so many fortified wines in there, but that shouldn’t be a surprise because…
JAMES ATKINSON: We’ve been doing that for a while.
HUON HOOKE: Yeah, Rutherglen produces some of the greatest fortified wines in the world. And there is a number of producers doing that and have been doing it for a very long time.
It’s just that fortified wines aren’t on a lot of people’s radar, you know, and they just don’t think of them when they think of the great wines of Australia, but they should.
JAMES ATKINSON: And you hope that that’s exactly the kind of reason to do something like this as well, is that it sort of elevates perhaps some of these less fashionable wine styles.
HUON HOOKE: Yes. If you’re talking about table wines, there are occasionally, I think there’s a few producers in there that might turn heads. I think Stella Bella is in there, isn’t it? Stella Bella is one of those Margaret River producers that is, it’s not really below the radar, but it’s not as high on the radar as people like Cullen, Vasse Felix, Moss Wood and so on, who are the famous established names of the region.
Stella Bella came along a bit later. And I think it has jumped up to a higher level since Luke Jolliffe has been the winemaker. He’s been there for a while now, but it takes, it takes a while for that kind of, you know, the quality level to be appreciated in the market and by us critics, and for that to be translated into results.
But it’s certainly happening with Stella Bella.
JAMES ATKINSON: Deviation Road.
HUON HOOKE: Deviation Road, there’s another one. Little producer, but making some of the best sparkling wine in Australia. And it’s the only sparkling wine that gets three merits. And that’s the Beltana Blanc de Blanc, which is a beautiful wine, which is released with about five years of age on it, as great Blancs de Blancs often need.
And a lot of people would say, ‘oh, gee, that’s got three merits, but what about Arras?’ Arras isn’t in three merits, but let me tell you, Arras has got several wines that are really knocking on the door. I’d imagine that they’ll, something of theirs will be in three merits before very long.
They’re just a great producer. I’m a bit surprised that it’s not in there, but it’s not up to me. It’s done on the numbers. I think that would be a threshold one.
Langhorne Creek wine: Underrated
JAMES ATKINSON: What do you think are some of the most underrated regions in Australia?
HUON HOOKE: Well, certainly Langhorne Creek is one of them. All the big companies would suck all the good grapes out of Langhorne Creek and put them into generic blends and never mention the word Langhorne Creek on the labels.
So, this was not doing the region any favours. the conspiracy theorists would say that was deliberate to keep the price of grapes down. And I think there’s some truth in that, but people like Bleasdale, Lake Breeze, a Langhorne Creek wine that scores, you know, 96 points, would probably get double the price in Margaret River.
That’s that kind of weirdness that goes on in the wine business, fashionability. If you look at Clare, Clare has a lot of eggs in the Riesling basket. Not many people would be aware that the most planted grape variety in Clare is not Shiraz or Cabernet, it’s Riesling. It’s the only region in Australia that has Riesling as it’s most planted grape variety.
Riesling itself is a bit unfashionable, it is ridiculously good value for money, it doesn’t deserve to be as affordable as it is, I’m not saying it should be put up, but you know, I’m a champion for the consumer, it’s great value. Riesling from Clare Valley is one of the, you know, it needs to be recognised for what it is.
So that, I would say, Riesling and Clare Valley are underrated. I think the King Valley is starting to be notable as a region. It’s possibly a little bit like Beaujolais, you know, it’s a bit stuck in the cheap and cheerful Prosecco and Pinot Grigio groove. Beaujolais is now fashionable, but for a long time it wasn’t.
I think that once you’ve got so many eggs in that basket of something that’s very, very common, very inexpensive, and it’s a supermarket wine, you know, Prosecco.
JAMES ATKINSON: I know you’re a big fan of Prosecco.
HUON HOOKE: Nothing wrong with a really good Prosecco, but most of it is, is pretty, pretty ordinary. Yeah, I think the potential in the King Valley is not really being realised yet, but some people are realising it for sure.
Another region that I could mention which I think is a bit undersung and has been neglected is the Swan Valley, which is odd because it’s right on Perth’s doorstep and wine regions that are on the doorstep of a major capital city usually do pretty well. But, the cool climate thing completely took the initiative away from the Swan Valley.
So even the Swan Valley producers started to produce most of their wine from down south, the cooler regions. But I think it’s been rediscovered recently. Howard Park now do a Swan Valley wine, which they never did before. A few other people. The Manns, Genevieve and Rob Mann, with their Corymbia label, are drawing attention back to the Swan Valley.
It’s a hot climate, but we are entering an age where people are now understanding that in hot, dry climates, what you need to do is plant the right varieties. Don’t put in Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, put in hot, dry climate varieties and you can start to make really good wine in those areas. Same thing is happening in Rutherglen and parts of the Barossa, you know.
The Riverland of course, they’ve probably been the leaders in this sort of thing. Let’s plant the Montepulcianos and the Fianos and the Vermintinos and the Arinto. You know, and the Portuguese port varieties, Touriga and so on. I really think we’re going to see a lot more of those in the future.
JAMES ATKINSON: Are there any other highlights that we can point out of wines that have been promoted for the first time or any other quirks of the process?
I think you wrote this week about, for example, wanting to get access to some of the older Wolf Blass vintages and not being able to, which was an interesting dilemma.
HUON HOOKE: Well, like if I really got my act together, I’d go out and buy some, you know, the auctions and, you know, buy some back vintages, but, it’s not that, that important to us.
The Black Label, we’re talking about Wolf Blass Black Label, has gone up in the first revision of the classification, it’s gone up from two to three merits. So that’s one of the handful of wines that’s been upgraded, which is absolutely no quarrel with that at all. I think it’s totally appropriate. There are 36 wines in our revision which have gone up or have come into the classification for the first time.
You know, there are wines that have, have tipped over the threshold from having nine vintages to 10 and become eligible, have suddenly come in, and there are those that the latest vintage has been high enough quality to push them from one tier up to the next tier. And I think that, if I went and mentioned a couple of others.
The ones that have gone up from one to two, we’ve got Best’s Riesling, Best’s Great Western Riesling has gone up. So wines that have had their 10th vintage tasted since the first classification include Tolpuddle Chardonnay. This wine was, I think, rated by Decanter as the best Chardonnay they tasted for last year in the world.
It’s pretty amazing. Hickinbotham Vineyards in Clarendon, in McLaren Vale, their wine called The Peak, which is a Cabernet Shiraz. Xanadu Reserve Cabernet, Torbreck’s The Laird Shiraz, for a lazy $800 $900 what it is. It’s gone up to three merits. Ashton Hills Reserve Pinot. The Oakridge 864 Chardonnay, Becker’s Grenache, Underhill Shiraz from Yarra Yerring, they’ve all gone up to two merits, those Ashton Hills and Oakridge and Becker’s and Yarra Yerring.
Frankland Estate Olmo’s Reward. And Best’s Great Western Reisling, up from one to two merits. Torbreck again, The Run Rig, has gone up from two to three merits. So, people who love Run Rig and have a cellar full of it wouldn’t argue with that. They’d say, ‘oh, it should have been three merits in the first place’.
So they’ll be happy. But the other thing, James, is that I mentioned that we review our classification every year. So a wine has a potential to go up every year, if it’s on the cusp. But it won’t go down for four years. So, this is building into the system a bit of stability. So, if a wine has, you know, a lesser vintage, it’s not going to dump it from three merits down to two, or from two down to one, or from one down to nothing, overnight.
It’s not going to happen. That would need to happen with more consistency. Four years, which would indicate a more endemic, degradation of quality in that wine. So this very rarely happens, but it certainly can happen. We thought about that long and hard, and we think that’s a fair way to do it. We don’t want things to go up and down like a yo-yo over a year, you know, one year you’re in three, one year you’re not, one year in three, one year you’re not.
That would be just a bit irritating for everybody, I think. So the four-year thing is a really good compromise.
JAMES ATKINSON: And of course you’ve got the top wineries of Australia, which is essentially sort of like a different product, if you like, that kind of gets spat out, like it’s the same data that kind of feeds into rating wineries rather than specific wines, is that correct?
HUON HOOKE: Yeah, that’s correct.
JAMES ATKINSON: And that seems to be getting some, had some good traction in recent years as well.
HUON HOOKE: Yeah. We’re very lucky that we’ve got the Good Weekend magazine on side. They’ve been, Katrina Strickland, the editor, and I’ve been working together for a long, long time on various things. She used to work for the Sydney Morning Herald.
I think I started writing for Good Weekend maybe 30 years ago. There was a bit of a hiatus in between. But I do a column there every second week now. So we work with them. So every year they publish our top 52. People say, why the top 52? Well, 52 weeks in the year, the Good Weekend has a system of, or a series of, special magazines that come out every now and then, ‘52 weekends away’, ‘52 great restaurants’, these sort of things, you know, one for every month, every week rather, of the year. That’s the genesis of it.
Our top wineries event was tacked onto that, so that’s how the 52 came into it. In fact, there is more than 460 wineries in our Top Wineries of Australia list this year. So this is top wineries, not wines, but it is probably the best five or six wines of each winery.
But again, this is done arithmetically. It channels into how high they rank on our top wineries list. So this year, the top winery was Oakridge, a great producer of Chardonnay and all sorts of other things Pinot, Cabernet.
JAMES ATKINSON: Good to see they haven’t dropped the ball having now been owned by obviously Endeavour Group.
HUON HOOKE: Fascinating to watch that, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the portfolio that they’ve got, I think it’s Paragon is that subsidiary, isn’t it? That has, Oak Ridge and a few other wineries. Yeah. Well, they’ve got Josef Chromy in Tasmania, they’ve got Chapel Hill, which is one of their first ones. Isabelle in New Zealand, just recently bought, Cape Mentelle.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah, I think that’s right, from LVMH.
HUON HOOKE: From LVMH. That’s astonishing. You know, they’ve got quite a portfolio of great wineries. And they have not, so far, devalued any of them. I suppose the cynics in the industry would have said, ‘Oh, they’re going to be cutting the guts out of them. They’re going to be selling them cheaply. They’re going to be adding products to their portfolio… Going to debase the image and the brand value of that company’.
They haven’t done any of that. And according to David Bicknell, who is Chief Winemaker at Oakridge, and has been there for 20 years, they’ve, been very non-interventionist, very hands off, very, don’t try and tell the people who know how to run their business if they’ve been doing it well for the last however many years. So I think that’s a good sign, a really good sign.
I have a bit of a resistance against people who sell, the biggest retailer in Australia also being one of the biggest producers. Somehow that doesn’t quite. sound right to me. I’d like to see more of a, you know, a distinction between the production and the selling side, but so far it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah. And what about when you look at that top 52 list, has there been a, you know, in the same way that we’ve sort of talked about the classification and what it says about individual wines, has there been any sort of interesting developments with how certain regions or certain wineries have come up that list in recent years?
HUON HOOKE: Well, I think the Barossa has done really well in that list and people in the cool climates say, ‘how can you possibly like these wines and give them a high rating?’ I mean, this kind of ‘us and them’ thing does still exist in the wine industry, you know, people who grow Cool climate Pinot and Chardonnay, down in the south of the country.
You know, I wonder if they ever taste Barossa Shiraz, because if they did, maybe they’d change their mind. There is some great wine being produced, as you would know. In the top five this year was a winery called Eisenstone. Which isn’t even a winery, it’s just a brand. Stephen Cook, he doesn’t own any vineyards, he doesn’t own a winery.
He buys grapes from some of the best growers in the Barossa Valley and he vinifies them in someone else’s winery. And he is, I think, one spot below Penfolds on the list. So that’s one hell of an achievement. The wines are extraordinary. And you say, well, I’ve never heard of these people before, never heard of Stephen Cook before, but he had worked for Pernod Ricard, established, I think, relationships with some of the leading growers in the Barossa, so when he decided to strike out on his own, he was able to tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘can you spare a tonne of this from this bit of your vineyard?’
You know, Hoffman Family Vineyards, for example, who own some of the best vineyards in the northern Barossa, supply him with some grapes. Everybody wants Hoffman’s grapes, especially their old vines and their old, you know, the best bits of their vineyard. How does Stephen Cook manage to get that? Good luck to him, you know, well done.
In a perfect world, all the best grapes from the best vineyards would be, go into the hands of the best winemakers. It doesn’t always happen that way. But in the Barossa, I think it’s becoming more and more like that. Great vineyards are now being produced into wine by the great winemakers.
JAMES ATKINSON: And here’s an obvious case where that wine’s got to get a few more runs on the board before it can earn its way into the classification.
HUON HOOKE: A long way off being in the classification. Yeah.
JAMES ATKINSON: Another example, I think you were quite glowing, as many people have been, about the Ossa Wines in Tasmania as well. Another sort of label that’s come out of nowhere.
HUON HOOKE: Exactly. Yeah. And it’ll be another, I think I’ve only tasted one vintage of this, so it’ll be another nine years before they can be classified.
But the curious thing there is that those are people who planted a vineyard, which had had not yet come into bearing, but Liam McElhinney, who was… That’s the winemaker for the Fogarty group in Tassie, was enlisted to make some wine for them. So he’s obviously using other people’s vineyards until their own vines come on stream.
But he’s obviously accessed some great fruit and has put it into their wines because they’ve got a fantastic Pinot, fantastic Syrah. Now, they’re all… all the wines I’ve tasted have been very, very good indeed. So, there are many ways of, of producing wine, aren’t there? I mean, some people, you don’t have to necessarily do it the old-fashioned way.
Planting your vines, waiting till they get mature, producing the wine off your own wine in your own winery, and then selling it. It’s a whole brave new world. The discovery thing is what gets me up every morning after writing about wine for 41… It’s my 41st year. But, no, there’s always excitement. There’s always something happening. It’s such a dynamic industry. At the moment, we’re in a bit of a slump and I’m hoping that that’s, you know, that’s short term. I hope it’s temporary. It won’t stop people from, new people from coming into the industry and doing exciting things. That’s always going to happen.
But I think it’s also true that the market, it pulls things, the market makes things happen. If you don’t have a market for great wine, fewer people are incentivised to try and produce great wine. The Morris O’Shea’s, you know, they’re a rare, rare breed. He produced great wine at a time when hardly anybody was interested in great wine.
Now we have a massive market and a huge audience of people who want great wine. So there’s a big, big reason to go into debt, work your bum off, really try hard to produce the best.
JAMES ATKINSON: Sure. Well, the new classification is out now. maybe if you could just kind of tell my listeners like where they can find that, and also will there be events coming up to sort of celebrate those wines where you can taste a selection of those top-level wines?
HUON HOOKE: Yeah. Well, The Real Review website is therealreview.com. Very simple. Go there and you’ll find that on the homepage there’s a list of events that are upcoming. The classification was launched in the Opera House. This is the biggest and certainly the most expensive event we’ve ever put on. We were paying for that for a while afterwards.
It was the Yallamundi Room, which is right in the front of the Opera House at ground level, where you’re looking out with a 180 degree view of the Opera House out of the Opera House windows with the bridge in the left, the ships going out in front of you and the Fort Denison to the right. An extraordinary location.
And we had quite a large crowd there. We filled the room. We had some of the great wines of the classification on for tasting, including a Hill of Grace we finished with. And Bob came over from New Zealand and we were all there. We had a pretty decent evening with some nice food and some fantastic wine and that’s where we launched the classification.
JAMES ATKINSON: And you’re getting a good cross-section of consumers to these events, you know in terms of like you’re seeing some younger people coming through as well?
HUON HOOKE: Yeah, yeah, that’s the heartening thing. When you go to our events, you’ll see people of various nationalities shapes and sizes and and age groups. This is really good to see and a lot of women, a lot of our subscribers are female as well, so that’s heartening. We haven’t angled ourselves towards any particular demographic, we just put it out there.
JAMES ATKINSON: Sure. Well, congratulations on the new classification. I can see the amount of work that’s gone into it and, yeah, look forward to finding my way around some of these wines that I was less familiar with.
HUON HOOKE: Thanks, James. It’s been great to talk.
