Four Winds releases Australia’s first ‘circular wine’
This is pretty cool. The Four Winds winery in Canberra in conjunction with the Hyatt Regency Sydney and food waste business Goterra have released an Australian first ‘circular wine’. It’s circular because food waste from the Hyatt Regency Sydney is being re-used and recycled onto the vineyard at Four Winds, to fertilise the vines, and the resultant wine that this food-waste-fertilised grows is then sold and poured at the Hyatt Regency.
There’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist. The food waste obviously isn’t re-purposed onto the vineyard raw. The winery has conscripted the common black solider fly or, more precisely, millions of its larvae. Food waste from the Hyatt Regency is consumed by the larvae and recycled onsite into a rich frass, or fertiliser, which nourishes the vines.
The inaugural wine – Four Winds Vineyard’s The Circular Vintage Shiraz 2025 – is being poured for the first time today in the Hyatt Regency’s restaurant and lounge bar. A Circular Vintage Riesling will be introduced to hotel patrons in September.
In the circular production process, organic waste from the Hyatt’s kitchens goes directly into Goterra’s specially built Modular Infrastructure for Biological Services (MIB) unit in the hotel’s basement. Resembling a shipping container the size of a single car space, the MIB is filled with millions of black soldier fly larvae that eat their way through the food scraps, excreting nutrient-rich frass.
The fertiliser is used on Four Winds Vineyard’s vines while the maggots, having doubled their size daily during a seven-day feeding frenzy, are used as protein for poultry and pet food.
Four Winds Vineyard CEO Sarah Collingwood said the circular wine project made perfect sense “We loved the idea of being able to return nutrients to the soil rather than having them end up in landfill. For us, this was about finding a practical way to close the loop between food, farming and wine, and we’re incredibly proud to put our name to The Circular Vintage series, which shows that innovation and quality can go hand in hand.”
Goterra CEO Olympia Yarger, who originally partnered with Hyatt Regency Sydney in 2024 to install the robot-controlled maggot farm as a way of sustainably managing the hotel’s food waste, said the beauty of the process is that nothing is wasted.
“Using insect frass to nourish vines creates a solution that benefits the vineyard, the hotel and the environment, and opens the door for new thinking across the wine industry,” Yarger said.
Hyatt Regency Sydney Executive Assistant Manager Nitin Kumar, who established strong connections with local winemakers during his previous tenure at Park Hyatt Canberra, said Four Winds Vineyard stood out as a producer that shared the hotel’s commitment to quality and innovation.
“Partnering with Four Winds Vineyard on an Australia-first initiative like this allows us to showcase wines with a story that resonates well beyond the glass,” Mr Kumar says.
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Photo caption above: Sarah Collingwood walks through the Four Winds Vineyard in Canberra with Goterra CEO, Olympia Yarger. [Image supplied].
Photo captions below:
Black soldier fly larvae.
The wine that was released today: the Circular Project Shiraz 2025.
The Goterra MIB food waste unit in the Hyatt Regency Sydney basement. [Image supplied].
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Campbell Mattinson is the founder of The Winefront business and is the former chief editor of Halliday Wine Companion. He’s published five books on wine, four of them bestsellers. He’s the only person to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once.
