Stepping Out of One of Australia's Greatest Wine Cellars

Send us Fan Mail Mark Dietz grew up with over 30,000 bottles of wine around him. The question this conversation keeps circling back to is a simple one: how do you step out of a cellar like that and go build something entirely your own?  Dietz is the co-owner of Small Island Wines, a boutique, cool-climate Tasmanian producer he runs with his business partner James Broinowski, focused on Riesling, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. But his path there wasn't a straight line. He started out chasing marine biology, half-convinced he'd become a reconstructive surgeon for shark attack victims, until the size of an actual great white changed his mind. What put him on the wine path instead was a blind tasting at Stellenbosch's Chocolate Block, where he called the varietal, the vintage and the hemisphere without really trying, and someone told him he had a knack for it.  He talks candidly about growing up inside the wine world his father Rudi built at Stuyvesant's House, the family's Sydney institution with cases stacked at home, suitcases coming back from holidays loaded with Domaine Romanée-Conti, and a cellar that runs into the tens of thousands of bottles. It shaped his palate long before he ever touched a barrel, and he's honest about what he took from it and what he deliberately chose to do differently.  The Small Island story itself starts almost by accident: one dinner at Golden Century, one taste of James's riesling and pinot, and a phone call that same night. What followed was a partnership built on cleaning things up — dropping the varieties that didn't fit, backing a handful of vineyard sites they trust completely, and letting Tasmania's cool climate do the talking.  Along the way there's a blind chardonnay flight where Mark misreads his own wine as European (against a 2015 Bernard Huber Germanic chardonnay and a 99-point Tolpuddle), a shared birth-vintage 1981 Wolf Blass with a genuinely strange origin story, and two properly good anecdotes of a magnum of Rockford's Home Block that turned a room full of non-wine-drinkers into collectors, and a $14 guess on a wine worth considerably more than that.  It's a conversation about legacy, about building your own name next to a very large one, and about why the story behind a bottle can matter as much as what's in the glass.  👉 Subscribe to @thewinedup and tell us below:  If you inherited a cellar like this, what would you open first? Drop it in the comments 👇  Go check out Small Island Wines: https://smallislandwines.com/  🎙️ Clip from The Wined Up Podcast  📺 Watch full episodes on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.  Follow us on Instagram @the.wined.up, @smallislandwines and @markdietz  🌐 Visit https://www.thewinedup.com.au and https://smallislandwines.com/  📩 [email protected]  #markdietz #smallislandwines #tasmanianwine #TheWinedUpPodcast #wedrinkwetrywelearnweconnect  We Drink. We Try. We Learn. We connect. Drink Responsibly. 🍷  YouTube Chapters  00:00 Growing Up Inside a Legendary Wine Cellar  01:37 Rapid-Fire Confessions and a $20K Mistake  07:39 Pouring a Hot-Off-the-Press Riesling  10:19 From Marine Biology to a Life in Wine  15:54 What Stuyvesant's House Taught Him About Moderation  16:59 How a Golden Century Dinner Led to Small Island  20:19 A Blind Chardonnay Tasting With a Twist  26:36 Streamlining the Range and Backing the Right Vineyards  36:10 Saltwater vs Cold River: Comparing the Pinots  41:45 Why Winemaking Isn't All Sunshine and Roses  55:39 A Birth-Vintage Time Capsule and Decades of History  1:04:03 The Magnum Story, a $14 Gaja, and What's Next  Follow Us on YouTube (@TheWinedUp), Instagram (The.Wined.Up), Tik Tok (@TheWinedUp), Spotify (The Wined Up), Amazon Music ( TheWinedUp), and Apple Podcasts (The Wined Up).  Visit our website https://www.thewinedup.com.au or email us at [email protected].    Drink More, Try More, Learn More.