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edges of reason

bottom of the bottle

from the cellar

Lyndon Kubis

from the cellar

in good company

edges of reason

bottom of the bottle

Lyndon Kubis

words

Cora Mitchell

images

No items found.

Lyndon Kubis and I first bonded over the one thing he loves talking about more than wine – snow. The moment he told me of his snowboarding ventures in Kashmir as well the mighty peaks of my hometown, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA, I knew he was a legend. The love of grapes and snow – what could be better?

Not only is Kubis a fellow outdoor adventurer – he is also a wine wizard. Every encounter with him results in drinking something delicious and being enlightened by his sorcery. While I interviewed Kubis we sipped on 2019 Karim Vionnet ‘Du Beur Dans Le Pinards’ Beaujolais Villages, a delicious and unique gamay that Kubis imports himself.

He began our conversation by explaining to me the story of the winemaker and his relationship to the land that yields the grapes, making each sip more enticing, fuller of purpose – and magical.

Karim Vionnet was born in Lyon, France to Algerian parents. He was adopted by a family in Morgon, where he worked for 10 years as a vineyard-hand and winemaker for Beaujolais legends such as Guy Breton and Marcel Lapierre. When he started his own winery, he was told that the use of his first name on labels would make sales difficult in modern-day France. So, he initially labeled his wines simply as ‘K. Vionnet.’ As time passed, Karim embraced his North African roots and not only began including his full name on his wines but also raised his middle finger to the close-minded men of old and named his Beaujolais Village cuvée ‘Du Beur Dans Les Pinards’. This loosely translates to ‘the Arab in your wine’ derived from the French expression du beurre dans les épinards – something you say when you have some extra money in your pocket that would allow you to ‘add a bit of butter in your spinach’.

There are few things better than a good story paired with good wine. Listening to Kubis, I found alchemy. He now proudly imports this wine through his company ‘Foreign Fruits’, and I can attest to all it offers.

Cora
Can you recount that ‘aha!’ moment you had that made you fall in love with wine? Was there a specific bottle of experience that lured you in?

Lyndon
So, it was definitely a bottle procured through illegitimate means from my friend's parent’s cellar after coming home late one night. I don't know what the wine was still to this day, but I remember it was very different from any wine I had had before. The wine that I'd had before in absolute abundance was Penfold Rawson's ‘Retreat’ haha and I remember the wine that night being very different to the Rawson’s; it was silky, rich, plush and the flavour just stayed in my mouth for ages... ‘length’ as wine professionals refer to it as now haha. If I were to think now about what it was, it was probably a shiraz from a warm climate that had a seductive sweetness about it; high alcohol, lots of fruit, all that stuff that’s seductive at first but that I now run away from haha. I just remember having that wine and being like “ah yeah so this is what people get excited about!” so I quickly got a job at a wine shop to learn more.

Cora
How have you gotten to where you are now?

Lyndon
Where are we?

Cora
Well, currently we are at the Moon Wine bar, which is one of five wine venues that you own, how did that happen?

Lyndon
I started working at Toorak Cellars when I was 18 when it was just a local bottle shop. It was one of three jobs I had whilst at uni. I took the job to learn more about wine following the bottle I had described above. My first boss and a regular customer named Geoff Lane were incredibly generous from the get-go. Every shift would involve tasting wines blind and it wasn’t long before I was completely obsessed with the idea that wine could taste like a ‘place’. A change of ownership in the business saw a change in priorities philosophically and essentially me being put in charge of buying as the new owners had little interest in the daily runnings of the shop. Five years later, after running the shop in between uni and other jobs I made an offer to buy it. They took me more seriously than I thought they would, and I scrambled to find a loan for my hubris. Four years later my good friend Mark Nelson and I fulfilled our dream of doing something together and partnered with two angel investors to open Milton Wine Shop. I went on to do The Alps with them as well as the Hills. Two years on we would all open The Moon together. There are two remaining band members, myself and Mark Hopkinson, who also produces very good beer out of Burnley Brewing. Really though, I’m here because of the incredible people who I work with every day, who are responsible for absolutely everything good that happens in the venues each day.

Cora
You own a considerable collection of wine institutions across Melbourne (The Moon, Toorak Cellars, Milton Wine Bar, The Hills, and The Alps), besides a great wine selection, what is the idea behind them?

Lyndon
It’s very kind of you to call them institutions. I guess we just wanted to make them community centres. Ten years ago, the idea for Toorak Cellars was loosely based on the cave à manger of Paris. Those places that you can call into on the way home after getting off the train, have a glass of something interesting and a piece of cheese, and potentially buy a bottle to take home for the weekend. They are all different places, but they are all bound by the love of wine that the staff has in each place.

Cora
Alright, I am going to ask you a loaded question. What are your feelings about the term ‘natural wine’?

Lyndon
Haha Cora it’s only 4pm, this is a conversation that can only properly happen at 2am at the kick on... But I always come back to Anselme Selosse’s response to this question, simply: “the forest is natural…”

I guess it’s a way of saying how can a wine be truly natural if it’s in aisle four at your local Woolies? Natural is the forest... trees, and fungi growing on their own accord, beating to their own drum. A vineyard is a very human-centric, and intervened space. We have been planting these vines in rows for centuries, depriving them of water and making them fight each other to semi-death so that their roots dive down deep in search of nutrients, water, and soil-derived complexity, all in the name of giving us superhuman courage in social settings that tastes great!

That said, even though we rarely use it in our wine bars, I think it’s a useful term in setting apart those wines that seek to express the place from which they were born. For me, this is the more important conversation. I’m obsessed with finding, talking to winemakers about, and drinking wines that speak of the postcode they came from.

Cora
You've always been an advocate of ‘authentic’ wines that exhibit a sense of place and feeling. In your eyes, what is the definition of natural wine?

Lyndon
On a personal level, I want to drink wines that taste like their postcode. I guess the tried-and-true quasi-definition of ‘wine from organically farmed/biodynamically farmed fruit with zero additions bar a negligible amount of sulfur at bottling, fermented using the indigenous yeast at its disposal’ does the trick but it misses the bigger story. When I think of the great wines of Australia and the world, that year on year resonates with the soil and sky of a given place that is made not adhering to all of these ‘criteria’ in strict practice it makes me think that the human element is very important in translating the story from vineyard to glass. I think ‘natural wine’ has become a religion, everyone religious believes in God(s) but disagrees with best practices regarding prayer. I think it’s universally agreed that doing as little and ‘touching’ the wines as little as possible is the best practice in expressing sight, but sometimes, like the gutter bars at ten-pin bowling, the village doctor is needed to step in to shepherd it to the palatable pins. Whilst it’s hard to define the term natural wine, I think it’s much easier to define the term ‘natural winemaker’. Producers like Sam Vinciullo in Margaret River are the definition of a natural winemaker. Uncompromising, pure in thought, and dedicated to letting the vineyard tell a story.

Cora
Has ‘natural wine’ become a marketing term?

Lyndon
Absolutely. It’s too lovely a term to escape the clutches of big business marketing departments. Minimum Chips and all that.

Cora
What is the most ‘far-out’ tasting note for a wine that you’ve said or heard and that makes perfect sense?

Lyndon
Okay, so can I start with the one that makes no sense? There was an importer that finished an essay of a tasting note with “moon dust lingers”. To my mind, unless you were sitting next to Neil Armstrong and Buzz on Apollo 11 you have no business saying that moon dust lingers in a wine. One that made a lot of sense was when someone described a wine as tasting ‘Soviet’, I heard it and picked up the glass, and sure enough, it was hard, angular, cold, and savoury, just like my old man!

Cora
If you weren't in the wine biz, what would you be doing?

Lyndon
I have no doubt in my mind that I would be a snow bum, doing back-to-back seasons running between Kashmir and Japan in the north and Argentina and New Zealand in the south. No doubt in my mind. Something to aspire to still.

Cora
Are there any producers or importers that are exciting you right now?

Lyndon
Too many to mention, I think it’s an incredibly inspiring time to be producing, importing, selling, and drinking wine in Australia right now. Three that are front of mind are:

Liz Carey, from Vivant Selections, is certainly an example of someone with encyclopaedic knowledge and a palette that is classically trained and is now exploring the very best of the avant-garde everywhere in the world. Her portfolio is one of Australia’s most exciting and only getting better!

Michael Glover, I have a personal affection for the wines of Michael Glover. A soft spot for hard wines. The wines he makes, whether it be those produced under his tenure at Bannockburn in Geelong or most recently in the Mourtere ranges of Nelson always reflect the winemaker. Hard, angular, uncompromising, and deprived of irrigation. Yet (in his own words) whilst many won’t enjoy them, you know there is integrity behind every one!

Tessa Brown, I’ve been a huge fan of Tessa Brown and the wines she produces with her partner in crime Jeremy Schmölzer for a very long time. It’s a testament to a classically trained winemaker who can push the envelope and seek to express place but in a considered and calculated way. Her recent 2020 Vignerons Schmölzer and Brown ‘Riesling S’ is an off-dry riesling from grapes that have been smoke affected from the 2020 fires in a minor way. As smoke compounds bind to sugar it was an experiment in working with nature for what is a real issue for Victorian producers in our current climatic future. I think it’s brave, clever, and inspiring and the ensuing wine is delicious.

Cora
What wine trend do you think needs to go away?

Lyndon
Treating the great wines of the world like Pokémon cards. Hemp wine can probably jog on too.

Cora
What do we need to see more of in the wine world, both locally and across the industry?

Lyndon
We need more wine gangs! Let’s make wine beef official! People need to take sides, dig in, and trade Instagram beef for real life! Imagine a ‘Ballroom Blitz’ type situation at the Imbibo tasting! Brilliant! Just joking, we need to be kinder of course.

I would personally love to see more wine journalism. Less of the ‘Instagram review’ variety, replaced instead with stories of place and people and articles that look at wine from a different lens or angle. There’s so much to think and talk about with wine, so much to love about it for so many different people, I find the new wave of ‘Instagram review’ journalism firstly so boring, and secondly unhelpful for the end drinker. More stories!

Cora
Is there a bottle of wine you regret drinking that you wish you’d held on to or had more of?

Lyndon
No. I regret none of the many counts of vinicide I have committed over the years. Always better too early than too late. And pretty much every bottle of wine I’ve ever had has been consumed with good friends, so how can I regret a glass of wine with great mates?

published

June 22, 2026

originally printed in

Veraison II

No items found.

from the cellar

in good company

edges of reason

bottom of the bottle

Lyndon Kubis

words

Cora Mitchell

images

No items found.

Lyndon Kubis and I first bonded over the one thing he loves talking about more than wine – snow. The moment he told me of his snowboarding ventures in Kashmir as well the mighty peaks of my hometown, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA, I knew he was a legend. The love of grapes and snow – what could be better?

Not only is Kubis a fellow outdoor adventurer – he is also a wine wizard. Every encounter with him results in drinking something delicious and being enlightened by his sorcery. While I interviewed Kubis we sipped on 2019 Karim Vionnet ‘Du Beur Dans Le Pinards’ Beaujolais Villages, a delicious and unique gamay that Kubis imports himself.

He began our conversation by explaining to me the story of the winemaker and his relationship to the land that yields the grapes, making each sip more enticing, fuller of purpose – and magical.

Karim Vionnet was born in Lyon, France to Algerian parents. He was adopted by a family in Morgon, where he worked for 10 years as a vineyard-hand and winemaker for Beaujolais legends such as Guy Breton and Marcel Lapierre. When he started his own winery, he was told that the use of his first name on labels would make sales difficult in modern-day France. So, he initially labeled his wines simply as ‘K. Vionnet.’ As time passed, Karim embraced his North African roots and not only began including his full name on his wines but also raised his middle finger to the close-minded men of old and named his Beaujolais Village cuvée ‘Du Beur Dans Les Pinards’. This loosely translates to ‘the Arab in your wine’ derived from the French expression du beurre dans les épinards – something you say when you have some extra money in your pocket that would allow you to ‘add a bit of butter in your spinach’.

There are few things better than a good story paired with good wine. Listening to Kubis, I found alchemy. He now proudly imports this wine through his company ‘Foreign Fruits’, and I can attest to all it offers.

Cora
Can you recount that ‘aha!’ moment you had that made you fall in love with wine? Was there a specific bottle of experience that lured you in?

Lyndon
So, it was definitely a bottle procured through illegitimate means from my friend's parent’s cellar after coming home late one night. I don't know what the wine was still to this day, but I remember it was very different from any wine I had had before. The wine that I'd had before in absolute abundance was Penfold Rawson's ‘Retreat’ haha and I remember the wine that night being very different to the Rawson’s; it was silky, rich, plush and the flavour just stayed in my mouth for ages... ‘length’ as wine professionals refer to it as now haha. If I were to think now about what it was, it was probably a shiraz from a warm climate that had a seductive sweetness about it; high alcohol, lots of fruit, all that stuff that’s seductive at first but that I now run away from haha. I just remember having that wine and being like “ah yeah so this is what people get excited about!” so I quickly got a job at a wine shop to learn more.

Cora
How have you gotten to where you are now?

Lyndon
Where are we?

Cora
Well, currently we are at the Moon Wine bar, which is one of five wine venues that you own, how did that happen?

Lyndon
I started working at Toorak Cellars when I was 18 when it was just a local bottle shop. It was one of three jobs I had whilst at uni. I took the job to learn more about wine following the bottle I had described above. My first boss and a regular customer named Geoff Lane were incredibly generous from the get-go. Every shift would involve tasting wines blind and it wasn’t long before I was completely obsessed with the idea that wine could taste like a ‘place’. A change of ownership in the business saw a change in priorities philosophically and essentially me being put in charge of buying as the new owners had little interest in the daily runnings of the shop. Five years later, after running the shop in between uni and other jobs I made an offer to buy it. They took me more seriously than I thought they would, and I scrambled to find a loan for my hubris. Four years later my good friend Mark Nelson and I fulfilled our dream of doing something together and partnered with two angel investors to open Milton Wine Shop. I went on to do The Alps with them as well as the Hills. Two years on we would all open The Moon together. There are two remaining band members, myself and Mark Hopkinson, who also produces very good beer out of Burnley Brewing. Really though, I’m here because of the incredible people who I work with every day, who are responsible for absolutely everything good that happens in the venues each day.

Cora
You own a considerable collection of wine institutions across Melbourne (The Moon, Toorak Cellars, Milton Wine Bar, The Hills, and The Alps), besides a great wine selection, what is the idea behind them?

Lyndon
It’s very kind of you to call them institutions. I guess we just wanted to make them community centres. Ten years ago, the idea for Toorak Cellars was loosely based on the cave à manger of Paris. Those places that you can call into on the way home after getting off the train, have a glass of something interesting and a piece of cheese, and potentially buy a bottle to take home for the weekend. They are all different places, but they are all bound by the love of wine that the staff has in each place.

Cora
Alright, I am going to ask you a loaded question. What are your feelings about the term ‘natural wine’?

Lyndon
Haha Cora it’s only 4pm, this is a conversation that can only properly happen at 2am at the kick on... But I always come back to Anselme Selosse’s response to this question, simply: “the forest is natural…”

I guess it’s a way of saying how can a wine be truly natural if it’s in aisle four at your local Woolies? Natural is the forest... trees, and fungi growing on their own accord, beating to their own drum. A vineyard is a very human-centric, and intervened space. We have been planting these vines in rows for centuries, depriving them of water and making them fight each other to semi-death so that their roots dive down deep in search of nutrients, water, and soil-derived complexity, all in the name of giving us superhuman courage in social settings that tastes great!

That said, even though we rarely use it in our wine bars, I think it’s a useful term in setting apart those wines that seek to express the place from which they were born. For me, this is the more important conversation. I’m obsessed with finding, talking to winemakers about, and drinking wines that speak of the postcode they came from.

Cora
You've always been an advocate of ‘authentic’ wines that exhibit a sense of place and feeling. In your eyes, what is the definition of natural wine?

Lyndon
On a personal level, I want to drink wines that taste like their postcode. I guess the tried-and-true quasi-definition of ‘wine from organically farmed/biodynamically farmed fruit with zero additions bar a negligible amount of sulfur at bottling, fermented using the indigenous yeast at its disposal’ does the trick but it misses the bigger story. When I think of the great wines of Australia and the world, that year on year resonates with the soil and sky of a given place that is made not adhering to all of these ‘criteria’ in strict practice it makes me think that the human element is very important in translating the story from vineyard to glass. I think ‘natural wine’ has become a religion, everyone religious believes in God(s) but disagrees with best practices regarding prayer. I think it’s universally agreed that doing as little and ‘touching’ the wines as little as possible is the best practice in expressing sight, but sometimes, like the gutter bars at ten-pin bowling, the village doctor is needed to step in to shepherd it to the palatable pins. Whilst it’s hard to define the term natural wine, I think it’s much easier to define the term ‘natural winemaker’. Producers like Sam Vinciullo in Margaret River are the definition of a natural winemaker. Uncompromising, pure in thought, and dedicated to letting the vineyard tell a story.

Cora
Has ‘natural wine’ become a marketing term?

Lyndon
Absolutely. It’s too lovely a term to escape the clutches of big business marketing departments. Minimum Chips and all that.

Cora
What is the most ‘far-out’ tasting note for a wine that you’ve said or heard and that makes perfect sense?

Lyndon
Okay, so can I start with the one that makes no sense? There was an importer that finished an essay of a tasting note with “moon dust lingers”. To my mind, unless you were sitting next to Neil Armstrong and Buzz on Apollo 11 you have no business saying that moon dust lingers in a wine. One that made a lot of sense was when someone described a wine as tasting ‘Soviet’, I heard it and picked up the glass, and sure enough, it was hard, angular, cold, and savoury, just like my old man!

Cora
If you weren't in the wine biz, what would you be doing?

Lyndon
I have no doubt in my mind that I would be a snow bum, doing back-to-back seasons running between Kashmir and Japan in the north and Argentina and New Zealand in the south. No doubt in my mind. Something to aspire to still.

Cora
Are there any producers or importers that are exciting you right now?

Lyndon
Too many to mention, I think it’s an incredibly inspiring time to be producing, importing, selling, and drinking wine in Australia right now. Three that are front of mind are:

Liz Carey, from Vivant Selections, is certainly an example of someone with encyclopaedic knowledge and a palette that is classically trained and is now exploring the very best of the avant-garde everywhere in the world. Her portfolio is one of Australia’s most exciting and only getting better!

Michael Glover, I have a personal affection for the wines of Michael Glover. A soft spot for hard wines. The wines he makes, whether it be those produced under his tenure at Bannockburn in Geelong or most recently in the Mourtere ranges of Nelson always reflect the winemaker. Hard, angular, uncompromising, and deprived of irrigation. Yet (in his own words) whilst many won’t enjoy them, you know there is integrity behind every one!

Tessa Brown, I’ve been a huge fan of Tessa Brown and the wines she produces with her partner in crime Jeremy Schmölzer for a very long time. It’s a testament to a classically trained winemaker who can push the envelope and seek to express place but in a considered and calculated way. Her recent 2020 Vignerons Schmölzer and Brown ‘Riesling S’ is an off-dry riesling from grapes that have been smoke affected from the 2020 fires in a minor way. As smoke compounds bind to sugar it was an experiment in working with nature for what is a real issue for Victorian producers in our current climatic future. I think it’s brave, clever, and inspiring and the ensuing wine is delicious.

Cora
What wine trend do you think needs to go away?

Lyndon
Treating the great wines of the world like Pokémon cards. Hemp wine can probably jog on too.

Cora
What do we need to see more of in the wine world, both locally and across the industry?

Lyndon
We need more wine gangs! Let’s make wine beef official! People need to take sides, dig in, and trade Instagram beef for real life! Imagine a ‘Ballroom Blitz’ type situation at the Imbibo tasting! Brilliant! Just joking, we need to be kinder of course.

I would personally love to see more wine journalism. Less of the ‘Instagram review’ variety, replaced instead with stories of place and people and articles that look at wine from a different lens or angle. There’s so much to think and talk about with wine, so much to love about it for so many different people, I find the new wave of ‘Instagram review’ journalism firstly so boring, and secondly unhelpful for the end drinker. More stories!

Cora
Is there a bottle of wine you regret drinking that you wish you’d held on to or had more of?

Lyndon
No. I regret none of the many counts of vinicide I have committed over the years. Always better too early than too late. And pretty much every bottle of wine I’ve ever had has been consumed with good friends, so how can I regret a glass of wine with great mates?

published

June 2026

originally printed in

Veraison II

No items found.

more cellar articles

The Church of Biodynamics

June 22, 2026

Taste as Memory: On Being an Authority

June 22, 2026

Thanks for reading.

Veraison's "Internatty" guides are a tool for navigating the broader world through a local lens. Our favourite discoveries from across the globe.

We published a lot of wonderful writing from friends and colleagues back in Veraison's days as a physical publication, and we wanted to give some of it a permanent home. Our "From The Cellar" articles are a curation of our favourite pieces from Veraison's print days, brought online for you.

Veraison's "Microclimate" guides are focused on what's happening here in Naarm. These guides try to shine a light on some of the often overlooked aspects of this ridiculous city of ours.

"Edges Of Reason" is a recurring chit-chat between besties Claire and Moira; a (very) loosely structured exploration of ideas, sometimes over a bottle of wine, with much vim and vigour.

The "Bottom Of The Bottle" article series is our long-form meandering exploration of ideas, championing the kinds of conversations you might get into when you're 750ml deep with a friend or two.

"BYO Club" is Darryl's routine roundup of the best spots to bring your best botts (and friends, of course). Each BYO Club Guide is compiled with a different theme in mind.

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