The flag at the South Australian High Commission in London is due to be flown at half-mast today, Monday 10 August, to mark the death of Matthew Jukes. He died last Thursday, 6 August, of a heart attack while on holiday with his family in Portugal.
Matthew was English home counties to the core, so this mark of respect from the Embassy is for all the work he did championing Australian wine over the past 30 plus years. His Hundred Best Australian Wines, which ran for 21 years (with a two-year interregnum during COVID) from 2004 until 2026, was a vast and detailed tapestry of the Australian wine scene. It evolved each year to capture the speed at which Australian wine has been changing. He was excited by these changes, which confirmed to him that Australia was one of the most dynamic and exciting countries in the world of wine. Nobody else in the UK had the breadth or depth of knowledge to compile such a report.
From 2006 to 2023, he also ran The Great Australian Red competition with Tyson Stelzer to highlight the quality of wines being made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz. For these two competitions, and much more besides, he was named Honorary Australian of the Year in 2012.
I first came across Matthew when he was working at the Barnes Wine Store for Francis Murray in the late 1980s. James Rogers was their consultant, and he taught Matthew and his colleague, Katie MacAulay, to assess and select wines by tasting them blind. It was one of the most exciting wine shops of its era, and was an early customer for Winecellars, the company owned by Nick Belfrage and his business partner that I worked for at the time.
Matthew developed his palate in Barnes, where he learned from James to judge a wine for what was in the glass rather than what was on the label, and went on to hone it at Bibendum Restaurant and then the Crescent Wine Bar on the Fulham Road. At the same time, he developed his career as a writer, producing a wine column for the Daily Mail for over two decades and authoring over a dozen books.
In 2014, he asked me if I’d organise a week of tasting in Barolo and Barbaresco. We did that in 2015, and he went on to write 11 editions of his Piemonte report. We would taste about 300 wines during the week while visiting producers, in restaurants or at the Massolino winery in Serralunga, where a number of samples were sent by estates. It was a great week which resulted in an in-depth report that was unrivalled. There was also a section on restaurants, for Matthew realised that no other wine region had such consistently brilliant restaurants as the Langhe.
As with Australia, he was excited by what he saw in the Langhe, and he was keen to proselytise. He would do this through tastings, talks, his writing and by buying and pouring the wines at home or for friends and colleagues.
Despite his enthusiasm for wine, he emphasised his entrepreneurial side when he developed Jukes Cordialities in 2020. This range of non-alcoholic drinks was based on an old English recipe and was named as the Best Drinks Range at the 2024 World Alcohol-Free Awards. He was proud of this success, and poured his energy into building international distribution for the brand.
The energy he displayed in the late 1980s, and the excitement at tasting the latest wines from Fontodi, Isole e Olena or Pieropan, or new arrivals like the first vintage of Shaw + Smith in 1990, was undimmed by the time he died, a month shy of his 59th birthday. This enthusiasm, allied to a sharp palate and an ability to turn a tasting note into a short and illuminating essay, was what made him special. Thanks to the rigour instilled in him by James Rogers, he could see through what was fashionable rather than enduring, and was unafraid to commit to a cause, be it Australia or Piemonte, if he believed in the innate quality of what was in the bottle.
That, more than any other reason, is why the Australian flag will fly at half-mast.