Best Dark Horse Winery: ChaLou Wines

2025 Dark Horse Winery

ChaLou Wines – Orange, New South Wales

ChaLou Wines has been named the 2025 Halliday Dark Horse Winery.

This is the award we give to a winery that has ascended to 5-star winery status for the first time. It’s an exciting moment for them, and for all of us.

ChaLou Wines' Steve Mobbs and Nadja Wallington.

If you’re going to step up to the hallowed status of a 5-star winery then why not do it in the finest of style. That’s exactly what Orange-region producer ChaLou has done: it entered six wines this year, with all scoring 91 or above, and four of these scoring 95 or above.

ChaLou – led by Nadja Wallington and Steve Mobbs – farms a plot of land at 900m above sea level, where it routinely excels in the growing and crafting of pinot noir, chardonnay and riesling. Indeed Shanteh Wale, our taster for Orange, described this year’s riesling release as ‘a scintillating wine, utterly delectable and impossible to put down’. You could say similar things about all ChaLou’s wines this year. – Campbell Mattinson

Nadja and Steve met at university before going their separate ways and working around the world. The duo reunited in Orange in 2014.

Steve Mobbs and Nadja Wallington both started making wine when they finished high school. "The longer we've been in the industry, the more we've come to love it. It's given us great opportunities to work and travel overseas and throughout Australia. And it's such a nice blend of agriculture, what winemaking is really founded in, and science. But there's a lovely creative aspect to winemaking as well," says Nadja.

After uni, the two went their seperate ways. Nadja worked in California, South Africa and Bordeaux, while Steve gained experience in Germany, New Zealand, US and Canada. "And then we were fortunate enough to both follow our feet to Orange at a pretty similar time," says Steve. That was in 2014. By 2021 they had established ChaLou (pronounced Shar-Loo).

"Steve and I, since we got together and got serious, always wanted to do our own thing... We did entertain the idea of going back to family properties, but we were really captured by Orange. Orange is a cool climate, you can create some really elegant, exciting wines. And there's also this wonderful energy that surrounds Orange, and we're really keen to be a part of that."

Previous Dark Horse Winery recipients include Singlefile Wines (2014), Haselgrove Wines (2015), Terindah Estate (2016), Arlewood Estate (2017), Boat O’Craigo (2018), Principia (2019), Dal Zotto Wines (2020), Yarran Wines (2021), Renzaglia Wines (2022), L.A.S. Vino (2023), Anderson & Marsh (2024) and ChaLou Wines (2025).

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This is an edited extract from the 2026 Halliday Wine Companion, with reviews by Dave Brookes, Jane Faulkner, Jeni Port, Katrina Butler, Marcus Ellis, Mike Bennie, Philip Rich, Shanteh Wale and Toni Paterson MW. Cover art by James Coe.