Circl restaurant also won the overall Wine List of the Year award. Visit Victoria

Australia’s Wine List of the Year awards for 2025 were presented on September 29, and among the long list of worthy recipients of praise were NSW restaurants Jonah’s of Whale Beach and Altitude, in Sydney’s Shangri-La Hotel, which were respectively the winner and a finalist in the award for the Best Listing of Australian Wines.

This award is important, as it shines a light on the disappointing fact that Australian wines are often under-represented on our wine lists.

It often seems as though Australian sommeliers and restaurateurs make a cringeworthy attempt to appear worldly by enshrining the rollcall of famous names from the entire globe, paying no more than lip-service to their local wines.

Do we expect to drink wines from far off places when we visit Italy or France or Greece? No! We expect their eateries to proudly showcase their local wines, and that is surely what Australia should also do.

Australia’s Wine List of the Year awards is helping rectify this: it also gives awards for the best list of state wines, eg, The Blue Door (Best Listing of NSW Wines), Capitol Bar & Grill (Best Listing of ACT Wines), Blackbird (Best Listing of QLD Wines), Hardy’s Verandah Restaurant (Best Listing of SA Wines), The Agrarian Kitchen (Best Listing of TAS Wines), Circl (Best Listing of VIC Wines), and Gibney (Best Listing of WA Wines). Circl, a Melbourne newcomer, also won the overall Wine List of the Year award.

The director and founder of Australia’s Wine List of the Year, Rob Hirst, says there has been a big shift in restaurants stocking local wines since the COVID pandemic.

“In every state there has been a recognition that the consumer wants to drink local. This year, 40% of entrants entered the Best Listing of Australian Wines category. Victoria dwarfs the other states, South Australia was next and Tasmania was also strong. There is still a cultural cringe, though, and sparkling wine is the last bastion of the cringe.”

Champagne is the last category restaurants want to leave off their wine list.

Hirst said this year, the awards had experienced record numbers of entries in every state.

Regarding the preponderance of super-expensive imported wines on many wine lists, Hirst defended this, saying;

“The high fliers, who don’t have a limit on their expenses, account for 20% of the spend in restaurants, so you can’t afford to ignore them.”

That’s where a lot of the restaurant’s profit lies.

“A lot of these high-fliers read the wine list from right to left. They look at the price first, and the biggest selling wine is the second most expensive, because they want something outstanding but they don’t want to appear too lavish.”

A new Sydney restaurant setting the pace, which was too new to enter the competition this year but will surely be a candidate for one of these awards in future, is Infinity, the new restaurant of celebrated Sydney chef Mark Best.

Infinity is a revolving restaurant located at the top of the Westfield Tower in the Sydney CBD. Mark Best made his fame at Marque restaurant in Surry Hills in the early noughties.

His wine list is 100% Australian, setting an example to his peers in a city where Australian wines often seem to be overlooked.

To his credit Best has insisted on an all-Aussie list—and that includes the sparklings. It is not unknown for some restaurants to have a strong Aussie list only to chicken out when it comes to sparkling: they feel they have to have champagne*. This is puzzling and can only be because they feel that is what their customers want. Good old-fashioned snobbery, perhaps.

There is no need for champagne when we have great bubble-makers, the likes of House of Arras, Deviation Road, Printhie/Swift, Delamere, Sittella, Terre à Terre/Daosa, Chandon, Sidewood, and others.

Best is also committed to Australian produce in his kitchen. Kudos for that. And to sommelier Polly Mackarel for selecting the wine list.

Sauvignon blanc is an area where you might expect New Zealand to be represented, but no! Not a single Kiwi savvy. Indeed, there were just eight wines in the sauvignon blanc and blends section of the list I viewed, one less than chenin blancs (nine), which is great to see and reflects the excitement around chenin today.

Another feature of the Infinity list is the highlighting of female winemakers. Wines made by women are signified by the bracketed letters (fw).

This list is big on food-friendly wines. There are 59 chardonnays, one of the current strengths of Australia, and 50 pinot noirs, both with a strong majority of Victorian wines; also 32 rieslings, 17 grenaches, and a ‘Light & Elegant’ red section of 12 which is big on gamay and pinot meunier.

To view the full results of Australia’s Wine List of the Year 2025, click here.

*Jonah’s and Altitude both have extensive lists of champagne.