Drink producer Legend – Patrick Walsh
Wine was never the plan for Patrick Walsh. Becoming a pop star was the original career goal and he began working in restaurants to “afford better bass guitars”. Restaurant life and then wine life took hold as he took on sommelier and restaurant manager roles at legendary Melbourne restaurants like Browns, Chinois, Walter’s Wine Bar and Langton’s. While working at Langton’s, Walsh won the inaugural Franklin Estate International Riesling Scholarship that took him to Europe to meet with riesling makers and that was when the penny dropped.
“It dawned on me that a lot of those makers weren’t being imported into Australia and so my wife Virginia and I started dabbling in that,” he says. “I used to do it on my day off and then it just started to grow from there. After we had kids, the late-night restaurant life was no longer working for us, so we decided to give it a crack and established Cellarhand with a portfolio of both imported and local winemakers. Twenty-five years later, here we still are.”
It might seem business as usual in 2026 for sommeliers to be importing a few cases on the side but back in the late ’90s it was virtually unheard of. Walsh’s pioneering work, says wine writer and MFWF Legend Max Allen, helped “turn Melbourne into the most exciting and adventurous wine market in the country”.
Walsh also helped to establish the Australian Sommeliers Association (now Sommeliers Australia) at a time when “most people didn’t know what the word sommelier meant”. He was driven not just by the desire to add professional heft to the term sommelier but to educate people about wine and demystify the culture around it.
“We’ve always had the philosophy that we sell wines made by good people to other good people, the whole idea of it actually being a vineyard to glass sort of thing,” he says. “One thing I’ve really enjoyed doing is dragging people towards wine in the right way.”
Drink producer Trailblazer – Nick Tesar
Nick Tesar is a highly skilled bartender with the hardware to prove it. He has won a swag of awards making and creating brilliant drinks in storied venues like Gin Palace, Lûmé and Bar Liberty for well over a decade (taking out the 2022 Australian Bartender of the Year Gong at World Class, among other things), but his enthusiastic contribution to Victoria’s drinks landscape extends beyond the bar.
The co-author of two cocktail books (with fellow traveller Sean Byrne), Tesar also judges spirit competitions, works as Creative Director of Gin Drinks at Four Pillars Gin Distillery and is a co-founder of Marionette, the award-winning Melbourne-based liqueur company that uses local ingredients sourced directly from farmers in a range that runs the gamut from cassis and amaretto to blue curaçao and apricot brandy.
“My family has a farm and I worked in fruit and veg when I was at university, so when we came up with the idea for an Australian liqueur company we really wanted to hero the produce that grows all around us,” says Tesar. “That was why we set ourselves the parameters of working with local farmers to create classically styled cocktail liqueurs.”
While there’s plenty about Tesar’s CV to applaud, his advocacy for the industry and his interest in educating a new generation of bartenders through being “a passionate bartender who inspires Melbourne’s cocktail scene” makes him stand out. As MFWF creative director Pat Nourse says, “Nick is all over it, as much a keen student of restaurants as he is good produce as he is good bars – his love of hospitality, and the joy he finds either side of the bar is something to behold.”
For his part, Tesar is enthusiastic about all the creative work being done in the Victorian drinks scene. “I want to build on that enthusiasm for a generation of younger bartenders to see this as a career as opposed to a stepping stone,” he says. “I like that I got to learn from so many amazing people and so feel there’s a responsibility to keep raising standards and bring people up.”
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