Winemaker of the Year: Virginia Willcock

2026 Winemaker of the Year

Virginia Willcock, Vasse Felix – Margaret River, New South Wales

Virginia Willcock has been named the 2026 Halliday Winemaker of the Year.

Our Winemaker of the Year award is a celebration of the people who do their darndest to put stunning wines on our tables, and into our lives.

Liz Silkman is the chief winemaker for First Creek Wines and Silkman Wines and is also a contract winemaker for more than 20 clients.

Virginia has never lost sight of why she became a winemaker. Her parents owned a small vineyard and, as a teenager, Virginia witnessed the joy of growing grapes and turning them into something more beautiful. It became her calling.

Passionate is a word too often brandished glibly about by those in wine but, with Virginia, it’s palpable. She cares deeply about every aspect of winemaking, from the people she works with to those special sites producing excellent fruit for her to turn into the best wines possible. Experimentation and fine-tuning go together; you don’t get to be one of the great winemakers without that.

In 2026, she marks 20 years leading Vasse Felix, and she’s at the top of her game. She has done so much to promote Margaret River nationally and internationally due to the quality of her cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay, and few have matched her complete dedication to the two varieties, the pinnacles of which are the Tom Cullity and Heytesbury. – Jane Faulkner

Silkman Wines is the brainchild of Shaun and Liz Silkman. This year, Liz will make 260 individual wines.

In the two decades since, Virginia has completely revolutionised Margaret River’s oldest winery, by shifting from commercial, big-lot winemaking to boutique, small-lot winemaking (vinifying blocks of fruit separately in smaller vessels, and eschewing additives such as commercial yeast and tannin), pulling out vines and planting new ones, and refining the portfolio to specialise in cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay – it’s hard to imagine now, but there was barely a whisper of the latter when she joined. “I didn’t want us to be a jack of all trades, I wanted us to be masters,” she says. 

“[Vasse Felix CEO] Paul Holmes à Court and I decided early on that it was really important that we weren’t just the oldest winery in the region, but that we were the best. We wanted to turn heads.”

And her influence has gone far beyond the walls of Vasse Felix. Her cutting edge, boundary-pushing winemaking techniques have redefined cabernet and chardonnay, not just in Margaret River but across the country. Already she’d picked up more awards than almost any other Australian winemaker over the course of her career, and we’re so pleased to bestow two more: 2026 Winemaker of the Year and, for her 2023 Heytesbury Chardonnay, White Wine of the Year.

Previous Winemaker of the Year recipients include Robert Diletti (2015), Peter Fraser (2016), Sarah Crowe (2017), Paul Hotker (2018), Julian Langworthy (2019), Vanya Cullen (2020), Brett Grocke (2021), Michael Dhillon (2022), Glenn Goodall (2023) and Kate Goodman (2024).

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This is an edited extract from the 2025 Halliday Wine Companion, with reviews by James Halliday, Campbell Mattinson, Dave Brookes, Jane Faulkner, Jeni Port, Marcus Ellis, Mike Bennie, Philip Rich, Shanteh Wale and Toni Paterson MW. Cover art by Vera Babida.

Image credit: Silkman Wines/Elfes Images.