Apart from their obtuse and obnoxious personalities, our competitors have an authoritative talent deficit combined with an unerring capability for making costly mistakes. If their usual lethargy and bureaucracy permit, when they ludicrously over-celebrate an undeserved accidental win, everyone else knows an omnishambles debacle is imminent.

Stoney Goose Ridge’s Hipster’s Reward, our sparkling Petty Nat and Cloudy Hay! lo-fi wines continue to deliver outstanding satisfaction to their target markets.  But there is room for more. After all, why should wine-drinkers seeking the wild roller-coaster ride of skinsy, orange natural wines in their unadorned no-fi state pay more for that privilege to those posing as well-meaning amateurs? There are exceptions to this generalisation but it’s like trying to spot birds in the dark in a country with very few birds.

The keywords for those wines – “funky” (aka faulty), “left-field” (aka faulty), “experimental” (aka faulty) and many, many more – depict defects as virtues.  It’s hard to make naturalistic wines that can withstand the faculties of disinterested, properly trained wine critics – unless like Stoney Goose Ridge you know the basic fundamental principles.

Supporting the excessive lifestyle and pompous bombast of semi-amateur whacko cranks (and companies posing as such) is not part of the Stoney Goose Ridge mission.

How those folk can support their influencer greed without damage to their conscience is a monstrous fraud on wine drinkers. Spouting the buzzwords about eco-inclusion, bio-sustainability, holistic wellness, restorative harmonic practices, handcrafted resonances, niche terroir, neo-organic, creative green well-being and other metaphysical mystic ambiguities are messages for “Danger, Will Robinson!”

So, the Limbo raises the bar to make a monumental statement. It’s as lo-fi as we can abide, minimal handling with token sulphur added at bottling, merely to ensure some shelf life and avoid assorted export labelling shenanigans. It’s sensual with outstanding tactility.

After sampling the Limbo against various market alternatives, focus groups swore they would no longer bother with competitors. They were astonished at its value proposition USP. “We’ll never waste our money on that other crap again” was one unsolicited comment.

The label of Limbo is also strikingly creative. Once more we outsourced the concept to the justly celebrated artiste Binksy, who curated a strikingly post-modern design without being stereotyped, lurid, unimaginative, repulsively offensive, puerile or any combination that are regrettably prevalent.

Further, rather than pitching the price of the wine above its alleged peers, Stoney Goose Ridge takes its usual incisive moral high ground, When I floated this brainwave at our skeletal market and sales experts, they recommended a price of at least $25. I am firmly a hands-on CEO and put my foot down to restructure their proposed pricing positioning principle in extremis. My merciless interventions in matters of grammar, fact, and taste are unparalleled.

I, Hector Lannible, am supremely confident that Stoney Goose Ridge’s wallet-friendly pricing determination of the Limbo will drive competitors to the wall, That’s the natural selection paradigm of capital market competition, and a very fair and reasonable outcome that benefits consumers. Channels not stocking the ultra-high-quality Limbo are covert fellow-travellers egregiously supporting outrageous customer rip-offs. They should be shamed and boycotted.

The 2024 Stoney Goose Ridge Limbo (fields-blend) RRP AUS $14.99 will be available from the usual stockists – hip bars, cafes, restaurants and quality liquor merchants.