Sarah Fagan

Written By Campbell Mattinson

In 2024 this site got ahead of the curve and told the world about Sarah Fagan’s arrival at TarraWarra Estate in the Yarra Valley. It’s the turning point in the history of one of the Yarra Valley’s most important and highest profile wineries. Fagan is widely known as a gun winemaker and judge of wine and it was fitting to mark this moment both in words and in images.

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Fagan allowed me a fair amount of time to take images and we took a variety of approaches. It would be fait to say that I took a lot of crappy images that day. But the series above and below are the goods and that’s all that matters. Fagan is facing a sliding door that opens and closes automatically, so we kept having to rush shots before the door closed again. Which is funny but then, a bit od=f deadline pressure is always a good thing.

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All the images on this day were taken with the Sony A1 and Sony 50mm f1.4, mostly shot between f1.6 and f2.

Campbell Mattinson

This post was written by Campbell Mattinson. Mattinson is a former chief editor of the Halliday Wine Companion book, former editor of Halliday magazine, former editor of Australian Sommelier Magazine and founder of The Winefront business. He is the author of five books on wine – four of which were bestsellers (The Wine Hunter, the Big Red Wine Book 2008, the Big Red Wine Book 2009, and the Big Red Wine Book 2010).

Mattinson is also the founder of the Mattinson Photography business.

Campbell Mattinson has been an independent journalist, wine critic and photographer for forty years. He’s the only Australian to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once. He’s a past winner of a Louis Roederer International Wine Media Award; is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter; and is the author of the best-selling novel We Were Not Men. He’s also a winner of a St Kilda Film Festival Award (as writer-director) and is a former winner of the national Best Australian Sports Writing Award. In 2026 three of his photographs were short-listed for the World Food Photography Awards.

Campbell Mattinson, who is 100% independent, has tasted between 5000 and 10,000 wines each and every year for the past 25 years. He tastes blind, in comparative brackets, as often as is practicable.

Campbell Mattinson is a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker and a wine critic. In all of these mediums his prime motive is to tell people's stories.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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