“The illustration of a black soldier fly on the label is the first indication that a new shiraz from the Four Winds Vineyard in Murrumbateman is not your average drop,” writes wine columnist RICHARD CALVER.

In the 1980s I saw the classic horror movie, The Fly, in which an ambitious scientist, played by a very muscular Jeff Goldblum, accidentally merges with a housefly while conducting a bizarre teleporting experiment.

His journalist girlfriend, played by Geena Davis, finds herself caring for a newly formed, hideous creature whose insect half gradually begins to take over with lurid and violent consequences. I rewatched The Fly and realised it’s basically a relationship story: starts with chemistry, ends with someone slowly turning into something unrecognisable.

But now the humble black soldier fly has starred in a good news story, no horror here.

The illustration of a black soldier fly on the label is the first indication that a new shiraz from the Four Winds Vineyard in Murrumbateman is not your average drop.

It has its own buzz: the winery has conscripted the humble fly or, more precisely, millions of its larvae, to produce Australia’s first “circular wine” in collaboration with hotelier Hyatt Regency Sydney and Australian food waste innovator Goterra.

The initiative sees food waste from the Hyatt Regency consumed by the larvae and recycled onsite into a rich frass, or fertiliser, which nourishes the vines that produce the grapes that return to the hotel in the form of Four Winds Vineyard’s new The Circular Vintage series.

Writing that, the nursery rhyme, This is the House that Jack Built, plays in my mind because each verse builds on and loops back to the previous ones, creating a kind of verbal “system” where everything is interconnected just as is intended in a circular economy. 

In the circular production process, organic waste from the Hyatt’s kitchens goes directly into Goterra’s specially built Modular Infrastructure for Biological Services (MIB) unit in the hotel’s basement.

Resembling a shipping container the size of a single-car space, the MIB is filled with millions of black soldier fly larvae that eat their way through the food scraps, excreting nutrient-rich frass.

The fertiliser is used on Four Winds Vineyard’s vines while the maggots, having doubled their size daily during a seven-day feeding frenzy, are used as protein for poultry and pet food. Disturbing and encouraging at the same time. 

Four Winds Vineyard CEO Sarah Collingwood says the circular wine project made perfect sense for the family-run vineyard, which won the prestigious Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy for its 2023 Shiraz in the 2024 Melbourne Royal Wine Awards. 

“We loved the idea of being able to return nutrients to the soil rather than having them end up in landfill,” said Ms Collingwood. “For us, this was about finding a practical way to close the loop between food, farming and wine and we’re incredibly proud to put our name to The Circular Vintage series, which shows that innovation and quality can go hand in hand.”

Four Corners has taken the repulsiveness of the clinging fly and put it to use in the best possible way. 

“There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don’t understand. Internal is the human heart.” –John Carpenter