It kept coming back, which is the interesting part.

There is a perfectly sensible time to get people excited about Tasmanian wine.

Summer.

The days are long. The vineyards look good. Everyone is outside. Tourists have arrived. People are already thinking about drinking wine somewhere pleasant.

So, naturally, we kept doing things in winter.

Not every winter. There was never a grand plan. No annual SMALL ISLAND WINTER FESTIVAL™ with a twelve-month marketing calendar and matching scarves.

It just kept coming back.

A Winter Release here. A Winter Feast stall there. A reason to open some bottles in July and see who was prepared to leave the house.

And, strangely enough, people were.

One of the better records of it is the 2019 Winter Release. Not because anyone wrote a stirring account of the evening, but because the price list survived.

It is actually a pretty good little document.

On one side were the CULT wines:

Pét-Nat.

Skinsy Gris.

Carbonic Pinot.

Wild Pinot.

Spiced Red.

The loose ones. Bright, odd, quick, relatively cheap and not taking themselves particularly seriously.

Then, on the same piece of paper:

Single Site.

North. South. Reserve.

Pinot Noir made from particular places, in tiny quantities, with rather more attention paid to the details — and priced at roughly twice as much.

That was the release.

No identity crisis. No need to pick a side.

Here is the serious Pinot Noir.

Here is the weird fizzy thing.

Would you like to try both?

That combination has probably always made more sense to us than it looks like it should.

The Single Site wines were about vineyards, seasons and small differences that seemed worth paying attention to. The CULT wines were what happened when somebody said, I wonder what happens if we do this?

Both required good fruit.

Both required us not to stuff it up.

One just came with fewer explanations.

And winter turned out to be a very good time for all of it.

Partly because Tasmanian wine makes sense in winter.

Pinot Noir in July, inside somewhere warm, next to something that has been cooking for four hours, feels considerably more natural than trying to convince everyone it belongs beside a swimming pool.

The Winter Feast made this point fairly effectively.

It is also a very different way to serve wine.

At a normal tasting you can talk.

You can explain the vineyard, the vintage, the barrels, the clone, the slope, the weather and whatever else you think people desperately need to know before taking a sip.

At the Winter Feast, people are cold.

They are hungry.

There is music playing, smoke everywhere, several thousand other people around them and somebody behind them wants to order.

You have perhaps eight seconds.

The wine has to do some of the work itself.

This is useful.

There is nothing quite like removing the carefully arranged tasting room, the vineyard map and the twelve-minute winemaking explanation to find out whether somebody actually wants another glass.

And they did.

There was another thing we liked about winter.

Anyone who voluntarily goes out for a wine event on a Tasmanian night in the middle of July has made a decision.

They could be at home.

Home has heating.

Home has dry socks.

Instead, they have put on a coat and come looking for wine.

That tends to make for a pretty good crowd.

So the idea returned.

Not every year, and never quite the same way. Sometimes there was a release. Sometimes a stall. Sometimes there were strange little wines that needed somewhere to appear. Sometimes there was simply something worth opening.

That is probably why recurring matters more than annual.

Annual means it is in the calendar.

Recurring means somebody looked around a few years later and said:

We should do that again.

Which is much more Small Island.

There was no grand philosophy about reclaiming winter. We did not discover a revolutionary new seasonal sales model.

We just worked out that the supposedly quiet part of the year could be one of the most fun times to put wine in front of people.

Good food. Cold nights. New bottles. People who actually wanted to be there.

Turns out that is enough.

Looking back through the archive, there isn't really a Winter Release program.

There is a trail.

Different wines. Different years. Different versions of roughly the same idea, appearing whenever there was something interesting enough to warrant getting everyone out into the cold again.

Which feels about right.

Some things become traditions because somebody schedules them.

Others become traditions because, every few years, somebody says:

"We should do that again."

Winter was the second kind.