ABOUT US
like anytime Sam tells a story, we took the long, winding journey to making wine. And like Leesa, when we get started on the task at hand, we can’t really be stopped.
After selling our home-brew store in Marrickville way back in 2018, we decided we didn’t want to live anywhere near it so left our beloved inner west for London. We settled in, found jobs in our “proper” careers and enjoyed the freedom of not running a business while discovering the difficulties of making friends in such a transient city when you are 30 and married.
Stubborn as ever, we stuck it out and found our people. Weekends and weeknights were spent checking out interesting local bars with wines and beers that were much easieR to come by, compared to our cosmopolitan Sydney. East London’s endless supply of local wine stores made it easy to stock up on orange wines from Georgia, funky bars with even funkier pet-nats, and of course Sam’s favourite pub with its epic selection of Belgian beers on tap.
As our time in the UK was wrapping up, Leesa had begun pursuing her WSET and completed level 2 and level 3. Our pursuit of natural wine didn’t quite land with her classmates but nonetheless, we pushed on and planned to do our very first harvest in France. We found a small permaculture farm who were also natural winemakers operating as negociants who regularly hosted WOOFERS and were more than happy to host us for the duration of the 2022 vendage and have us be pickers and cellar hands. Vincent and Millie, our gracious hosts and now very dear friends, were incredible teachers and shared their practices and knowledge of natural winemaking. They gave us the encouragement and confidence we needed so that when we finally moved home in December 2022, we begun a hunt for grapes of our own!
our ethos
we started bad neighbours WINE with the intention of making natural / lo-intervention / lo-fi wines. We knew it would be hard work, sourcing the fruit we wanted in the oldest region in australia - a region full of winemakers who are deeply rooted in tradition and conventional practices.
we are still very much learning on the job, but we take it as an opportunity for us to improve every vintage, without COMPROMISING our values.
Natural wine has no legal definition, so the term gets thrown around a lot. to us, the best wine should be using organically grown fruit, with nothing added (preservative, nutrient, cultured yeasts) and nothing taken away (fining, filtration).
As negociant winemakers, without a vineyard of our own, sourcing organic fruit can be challenging, and we are pragmatic about not letting good fruit get wasted even when the viticulture isn’t organic. However, we want to do the best we can by the planet, and will always try to work with growers to encourage more sustainable and organic farming practises. when you buy wine from Bad Neighbours, we will always let you know exactly what you are getting, including indicating if we’ve used organic fruit, or any sulfite (and how much).
We use these terms to describe our wines.
Lo-fi, Low Intervention, Minimal Intervention: A less industrialised form of winemaking, using hand picked fruit, wild/Spontaneous fermentation, not adding any fining products or filtering the wine. May include a very small use of sulfite (below ~40 ppm but ideally less)
Natural Wine: Same as Lo-fi but using only Organic Fruit
Zero/Zero: “Nothing added, nothing taken away”. Hardcore Natural wine, without any sulfites.
It’s worth noting that not everyone makes these distinctions. Many wines marketed as minimal intervention use sulfite at levels between 100-200 parts/million, machine picked fruit and added yeast culture. Many wines marketed as “natural” use non-organic fruit. but we want to be honest, and we want our customers to be informed.
