Wine with Meg + Mel
Wine with Meg + Mel
Mel Gilcrist, Meg Brodtmann
Wine News Goes Rogue: A Heated Debate About Whether Winemakers Matter To Brands Anymore
30 minutes Posted Jul 22, 2026 at 7:00 pm.
Welcome And A Sudden Detour
Oakridge News Hits The Yarra
Made Redundant Versus Departed
When A Winemaker Is The Brand
How Retail Giants Entered Wine
Ghost Brands And Shelf Control
ACCC And The Politics Going Dark
Human Cost And The Dairy Parallel
Retail Pivoting Meets Vineyard Reality
What Drinkers Can Do Next
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30:07
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Show notes
Send us Fan Mail A winemaker gets cut, a flagship winery gets prepped for sale, and suddenly we are not talking about tasting notes anymore. We dig into the Oakridge bombshell: David Bicknell, the winemaker many credit with changing the direction of Australian Chardonnay, is made redundant after decades shaping the Yarra Valley’s most influential single-vineyard wines. The language around it matters, the emotion is real, and the business logic is confronting. From there we zoom out into the ...