Wife and husband team, Yoko Luscher-Mostert and Andries Mostert in their beautiful old mill house in Denmark, WA, form the playful project Brave New Wine. Established in 2012, Brave New Wine is an adventure in wine, they source only the best fruit that utilises organic/biodynamic management from high quality sites in the Great Southern. Their wines are created using natural ferments, high quality fruit and traditional oak.
Brave New Wine was conceived one stormy night, through Andries' frustrations with his job working in conventional wineries and the rigid, industrial and mechanical way in which the wines were made. They started out small, making a barrel of whole-bunch Chardonnay, a Pet Nat and a skin-contact Riesling. The end result was they had 3 brilliant natural wines, these were the wines they wanted to drink, and the best part, they were fun to make too! They decided to make a go of it alone – and Brave New Wine switched from being a fun hobby to a real business.
Andries has been working in the Australian wine industry for over 25 years. He has done vintages and worked on vineyards in the Hunter Valley, Adelaide Hills, Yarra Valley, Great Western, Margaret River, Central Otago, Emilia-Romagne Italy, Pemberton, and of course, the Great Southern.
Yoko has managed to rack up an amazing amount of unfinished degrees and apprenticeships (Fine Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Cabinet Making, and strangely, Accounting), she has an innate need to keep the creative juices flowing, she paints all the Brave New Wine labels, and makes what she calls “Yokoshopped” Social Media posts.
Brave New Wine make some exceptional juice and are a shining addition to the West Australian wine scene, we really hope to see more people/projects like this in the future.