https://linktr.ee/theotherbdx, http://www.theotherbordeaux.com/

The Other Bordeaux, Sydney (2026)

07/08/2026

July 2005.
My late uncle Bernie was gruff, blunt, unpolished, but as true a Francophile as you’ll ever meet. He lived on rustic wine, boudin noir, and tasty gossip picked up in bars.
Straight after school in England in the early 60s he was taught Russian from zero to fluency in 6 months at an RAF base to eavesdrop on enemy bombers during the Cold War. He ended up speaking 7 European languages fluently and worked as a translator for many governments. The one time I asked if he’d ever worked as a spy he sneered, “why? Who are YOU working for?!”
He encouraged my love of winemaking from a young age and when I went to France in 2005 he gave me the use of his house in Lagorce in the Ardèche, close to where I was working for Burgundy powerhouse Louis Latour.
Bernie’s dream was to retire to the Ardèche and make wine. The vines never really took off, though he did plant some Italian varieties he smuggled into France.
His first house in Lagorce (arrow shows entry) was right on the town square.
He couldn’t cook to save his life but took me to every restaurant he loved, always classic places serving dishes that represented some culinary tradition, from pan-fried foie gras and salty apple slices in Lagorce to the offal classics of Rome’s medieval ghetto.
Bernie wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but, from decades talking to vignerons in bars after work (and frequently during it), he had a strong understanding of European wine and food culture and shared it with me as if I was the son he never had. For that I’ll always be humbled.
I import as much wine as I can from the Ardèche and it’s thanks to Bernie that this wild part of France is now so strongly supported and appreciated in Australia. It’s a cultural connection I’m proud of.
Oh, and Bernie introduced me to the extraordinary winter truffle markets in Richerenches, across the Rhône Valley. Note the cops everywhere, yet somehow not noticing the boatloads of black market cash changing hands right in front of them!
Bernie’s the bald guy in the last photo, taken at an antiques market I don’t even remember going to with him. Cheers Bernie!

04/08/2026

October 2001. The Bordeaux harvest had just finished.

We weren’t heading to a restaurant.

We were heading deep into the Landes forest.

Our boot was loaded with bottles of Château Pique-Caillou 1982 as gifts for the hunters who were hosting us, along with what felt like half the Atlantic coast’s oyster harvest. The oysters were carried into the woods on platters balanced on our heads (that’s me on the left, back when I had hair!), where they were eaten alongside huge quantities of Bazadaise steak, locally made foie gras and whatever mushrooms and wild pigeons we could forage during the day. And homemade Armagnac with choux pastry deserts.

It was gloriously, unapologetically French.

The woodland was silent apart from birdsong and periodic outbreaks of our laughter echoing among the trees. And the odd gunshot! We were miles from civilisation. The food seemed endless. The wine flowed just as freely. Looking back, we probably drank rather more than was sensible (especially with so many guns around) —but that really was the culture of rural Bordeaux at the time.

People often ask me why I devoted my career to French wine.

It wasn’t because of scores, critics or investment potential.

It was because of days like this.

I slowly realised that in France, wine isn’t really the point. Wine is simply one part of a much bigger culture built around food, family, generosity, friendship and spending time together around a table—or, in this case, lost in the middle of a vast forest.

Those experiences shaped me far more than I realised at the time.

And 25 years later, they’re still the reason I do what I do. 🍷🇫🇷

01/08/2026

July 1998.

I boarded a little stopping train at Bordeaux Saint-Jean.

It rattled south towards Langon, pulling into tiny stations every few kilometres. Often nobody got on or off the train. The doors just hissed opened, stayed like that for a minute, and then snapped shut before we slowly creaked off to the next station.

I forgot to validate my ticket and got a lecture from the conductor. I really didn’t understand a word they said. Another passenger tried to help. Nobody really seemed all that concerned. It was just something to pass the time. An opportunity to interact.

The windows were all wide open.

It seemed everyone smoked.

The orange curtains billowed in the hot summer breeze while cigarette smoke coiled out over the vineyards.

I’d never seen vines like that before.

They stretched out under a great blue sky from one side of the Garonne to the other.

I was twenty-one years old.

Nervous.

Excited.

Wondering what on earth I’d got myself into.

Then, somewhere between Bordeaux and Langon, it happened.

I fell in love with France.

Not just the wine.

The language. The people. The villages. The vineyards. The quiet rhythm of village life.

Twenty-eight years later, I’m still climbing on planes to France.

Still walking vineyards. Still catching trains wherever I can.

Still sitting at growers’ kitchen tables.

Still learning.

And still bringing a little piece of France back to Australia.

Because some journeys never really end.

And that train was taking me to my very first vintage. I had no idea it was also taking me towards the rest of my life.

01/08/2026

For 28 years I’ve been getting on planes to France, not waiting for France to come to me.

Since 1998 I’ve lived and worked in vineyards across Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Loire, Ardèche and Roussillon. I’ve spent countless days bouncing around vineyard tracks in battered vans, learning terroir in French from the people who know it best: the vignerons themselves. I’ve attended everything from major Paris trade shows to tiny winter wine gatherings in village halls tucked away in the Northern Rhône. I’ve shared tasting tables with growers in muddy boots, winemakers, sleekly suited négociants and, yes, even French presidents.

That isn’t a buying trip. It’s a lifetime.

Most supermarket wine buying works very differently. Large retailers typically rely on meetings with suppliers and sales representatives, with buying decisions necessarily influenced by production volumes, pricing and the ability of suppliers to meet the demands of a national retail network.

That’s exactly why The Other Bordeaux exists.

I don’t wait for small, family-produced French wines to somehow find their way to Australia (because they rarely do). I go to France, year after year, to find them myself. To walk the vineyards. To taste in the cellars. To build relationships with the families who make the wines.

There’s a difference between buying wine… and living it. I made that choice 28 years ago.

Photo: Tracking down Champagne maestro Vincent Testulat in his cellars in Épernay a couple of years ago. That’s his name on the barrel.

31/07/2026

A definite sign that you’re in France 🇫🇷! As spotted in the Sauternes wine region, Christmas Day 2011. Preignac where I took this snap is one of the five communes (principal village areas) that constitute the Sauternes wine region, along with Barsac, Bommes, Fargues, and Sauternes itself.

31/07/2026

The vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape have produced some of France’s most iconic wines and was the first region in France to gain appellation “AOC” status in 1936. With the song of cicadas ever present in summer, beneath these vines lies a remarkable layer of rounded stones (galets roulés), which soak up the Provençal sunshine by day and gently release warmth through the cool night, helping grapes ripen to perfection. The result? Rich, powerful reds and increasingly celebrated whites with incredible depth and character. It’s one of those places where history, geology and winemaking come together in spectacular fashion. If you’ve never experienced a great Châteauneuf-du-Pape, you’re missing one of the true treasures of the French wine world. 🇫🇷🍷

27/07/2026

How’s your Monday morning looking? I’m just doing some QC on a shipment that got delivered at 8am and I can only say that it’s a thrill to know how much pleasure these new wines are going to bring to so many people, especially the ones that have been pre-cellared like the benchmark 2020 Madiran, full of leather, plum, and walnut notes, the 2013 Premier Cru Chablis flashing like a candy, butter, and honey-filled lighthouse beam, the 2014 Cadillac botrytis erupting with high note perfumes, or the unashamedly meaty and muscular 2019 Saint-Émilion. Truly a beautiful spread of wines delivered in mint condition in a very tightly sealed and refrigerated shipping container, packing two digital temperature-recorders just to be on the safe side though the aromatic precision and intensity of all these wines make it very clear without any digital evidence that this cargo has been very well looked after from the vineyards in France to our premises in Sydney. Packing operations are already happening and we will be dispatching these to customers in full by COB Wednesday. Coming your way!

26/07/2026

Bonjour!

I’ve just given The Other Bordeaux a serious upgrade.

At first glance, you probably won’t notice much. That’s by design.

The website still looks like The Other Bordeaux—just a little sharper, cleaner and more polished.

The biggest improvements are behind the scenes.

🍷 Faster performance
🛒 A much smoother checkout
➕ You can now add wines to your cart without leaving the page you’re browsing, making it much quicker to build an order.

It’s all about making it easier to find the wines you want and get them to your door with less clicking and less waiting.

If you haven’t visited for a while, take the new site for a spin and let me know what you think. I’m always keen to hear your feedback.

And here’s a 25% coupon code to get you a hefty discount on any wine on the home page ready for immediate dispatch:

FB25

Just put FB25 in the coupon code field in your shopping cart when you’re checking out and don’t forget to click on “apply coupon” to seriously downsize your bill. Coupon is valid until the end of August.

Cheers!

Tom

11/07/2026

Most wine sellers want to show you sunsets over vineyards.

I’d rather show you this.

On the left is a temperature recorder. It travels inside every container of wine I import from France.

Its job is simple: record the temperature every step of the journey.

From the moment our wines are loaded in Le Havre, across the Bay of Biscay, through the tropics, around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean and finally into Sydney… the container stays at 12°C.

Why does that matter?

Because great wine is alive. Expose it to excessive heat for days or weeks and you risk robbing it of the freshness, purity and precision that the vigneron worked so hard to create.

This bottle of Nuits-Saint-Georges Premier Cru Les Chabœufs 2023 didn’t just survive the journey.

It arrived exactly as it left the cellar in Burgundy.

Sometimes the most important part of importing wine isn’t glamorous.

It’s making sure that when you pull the cork in Australia, you’re tasting France—not the voyage.

🇫🇷➡️🇦🇺🍷

13/05/2026

September 2017, somewhere near the Dordogne.

I cannot remember this vigneron’s name now, which bothers me a little because I remember so clearly the intensity with which he spoke about his vineyard. His dog wandered quietly beside us as we walked between rows of old vines under a leaden Bordeaux sky, the atmosphere buzzing with a coming electrical storm so typical of late summer here, and for more than an hour he explained the history of the land with the kind of passion that cannot be manufactured or taught in business school.

What fascinated me most were his ancient vines, some over 100 years old, still planted on their own original roots, some extending 10 metres along the trellising. In most of Europe that became almost impossible after the phylloxera catastrophe of the late 19th century, when the tiny root-killing insect devastated vineyards across France. But here, beside the Dordogne, the river flooded every winter and naturally interrupted the life cycle of the bugs. So these vines survived where so many others did not. Living history, still producing fruit.

He also spoke about forgotten Bordeaux grape varieties that he was trying to preserve before they disappeared entirely into the machinery of modern commercial winemaking. There was nothing fashionable or performative about it. Just a quiet determination to protect something old, regional and fragile from being lost.

I never actually bought his wines. That happens when you spend your days visiting growers across Bordeaux — you simply cannot buy everything you taste. But that almost misses the point.

Because one of the great privileges of working in wine is that knowledge is shared so generously. You arrive as a stranger and leave having been taught something profound about agriculture, history, nature and time by somebody who has devoted their life to a small patch of earth beside a river.

The Other Bordeaux

07/08/2026

04/08/2026

01/08/2026

01/08/2026

31/07/2026

31/07/2026

27/07/2026

26/07/2026

11/07/2026

13/05/2026

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