2026 Best New Winery
Elanto Vineyard – Yarra Valley, Victoria
Elanto Vineyard has been named the 2026 Halliday Best New Winery.
To truly encapsulate the meaning of ‘Best New’, we have recalibrated this award. Best New will no longer refer to wineries submitting to the Companion for the first time, though these will still be identified throughout the pages of this Wine Companion book by the new leaf symbol. Rather, this award celebrates a new winery with newly established vines (seven years’ vine age or younger) or a new winery (no older than 5 years) making wines with established, owned or sourced fruit.
And, on this premise, we are delighted to celebrate Elanto and its contributions to the Australian wine landscape.
It’s not often Jane Faulkner is so emphatic in her praise, but it also isn’t every day you identify a future icon in the making.
We first discovered Elanto when taster Jane Faulkner wrote about the close-planted vineyard for the Winter 2024 edition of Halliday magazine. It’s not often Jane is so emphatic in her praise, but it also isn’t every day you identify a future icon in the making. And that’s exactly what Elanto is. Vigneron Sandro Mosele (ex-Kooyong, Port Phillip Estate) knows good wine starts in the vineyard.
But Elanto’s is not just any vineyard, rather, it’s one planted at extremely high density – 11,111 vines per hectare, 1.2 metres between rows and 0.75 metres between vines. It’s hard to comprehend the magnitude of such a project, and the accompanying financial obligations, until you taste the wines.
It’s in the glass where it all makes sense. Both the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are drinking well beyond their six year old vines suggest they should. This is a new name to get very excited about. – Katrina Butler
“With HD, the vineyard architecture is about having less fruit for the vine but also, by having the vines so close, the roots are forced down rather than sideways,” Sandro explains, adding that the deeper the roots, the better the terroir is expressed. “I think a lot of people might see it as being experimental, but it's far from it. It's just not common in Australia,” says Sandro.
The proof, as always, is in the glass. “Never in a million years would I have picked the vine age given the savouriness, detail and complexity in this wine,” wrote Jane Faulkner in her review of the 2023 Pinot Noir.
Sandro agrees. “If there's one thing that I hear most commonly it's, ‘are you sure this is first crop?’ People don't expect to see that level of concentration, intensity and detail in a first crop wine.”
Organic principles underpin the operation, and the vineyard is managed without herbicides. Their philosophy is all about cultivating the best fruit possible and letting it do the talking. “We have a saying here that everything we do in the winery is about not losing the quality that's come in from the vineyard. Don't lose quality, because we can't add it.”
Previous Best New Winery recipients include Rob Dolan Wines (2014), Flowstone (2015), Bicknell fc (2016), Bondar Wines (2017), Dappled Wines (2018), Mewstone Wines (2019), Shy Susan (2020), Varney Wines (2021), Place of Changing Winds (2022), Living Roots (2023), Joshua Cooper Wines (2024) and Sami-Odi (2025).
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This is an edited extract from the 2026 Halliday Wine Companion, with reviews by Dave Brookes, Jane Faulkner, Jeni Port, Katrina Butler, Marcus Ellis, Mike Bennie, Philip Rich, Shanteh Wale and Toni Paterson MW.
