The sun cuts through a gap in my curtains and heads straight for my eyes. Awake a good hour before my alarm or any rooster crowing, I lie there wondering what the hell I've gotten myself into.

Pulling aside the pre-1990's-chic quilted bedspread that may have once matched the curtains I sit, in the dark, struggling with an internal debate. Do I have a shower?

The answer is no and I struggle into thermals, tracksuit pants and jeans, thermal shirt, heavy knit and Spiewak jacket. Apparently it'll snow some time this week.

You see I've just agreed to trial a position managing the accomodation, conference centre and new distillery project at a winery in the Macedon Ranges in Victoria, Australia. Three days before I was waking up on a lake in New South Wales, lounging in the winter sun (a freezing 20 degrees Celsius) writing a book on suspected fake histories of cocktails. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

I stumble across the path down to the cellar door, it's dark and hidden away from view and like most parts of what I've seen of this place, in desperate need of an update. I try the sliding door, it's locked. The reception door, it's locked. The kitchen door... success!

Ignoring a dining room that would make my own grandmother (R.I.P.) stop and say "Damn, that's some dated sh*t" I walk into the cellar door and turn on the lights. It hits me again.

Not the fear that it was the wrong decision to be here. Amazement.

The room is dark and cluttered, even with lights on, yet every spare bit of space on the back bar is taken up. Not with bottles of wine but with awards.

Every single spit bucket, water jug, decanter, framed certificate and piece of sliver or glass that may or may not have a purpose is engraved with yet another award. This is just a small portion of the awards littering this property. Every single one of them bar a handful are for just one thing; NV Brut.

My time owning a bar saw a number of sparkling wines and champagnes on the menu. Not to mention a few champagne and sparkling wine connoisseur clubs and events (you ever want to see accountants dressing in Tom Ford but getting trashed like Lindsey Lohan, host one of these). Never, in my sommelier course, in my time in the bar, in my research in to the history of champagne, never have I ever heard of Cope-Williams Winery, or if I had it wasn't considered particularly special.

In fact, the Macedon Ranges is barely even a blip on the wine radar in Australia. This is truly bizarre as it's the coldest cool-climate wine region, it's less than an hour from Melbourne and it's geology and meteorology is a close to Champagne as you can get without transplanting it to France.

The sparkling wine from the region is frankly astounding. That most venues in Melbourne and Sydney choose Tasmanian sparkling is completely understandable, it is cheaper than champagne and on par with the majority of NV releases. That almost none stock Macedon Ranges sparkling is simply a huge error on their part.

It's like a boxing fan asking "Who's Mohammed Ali? I know Mike Tyson?"

While their Francophile mates are saying "You mean Jack Dempsey?"

It doesn't make sense. When you consider this quiet, unassuming winery produces a brut so good it has won virtually every award it has been entered into since 1993 it's mind boggling.

I didn't believe any of it. The engraved trophies, the framed certificates, the water jug I use to fill the espresso machines's tank... none of it. There's no chance a wine that wins this many awards would not be in the major retailers and restaurants. Unless it wasn't any good and just won the awards in some bizarre category with only 1 entrant.

Being firmly of the school that most NV brut is a riff on the same chord and always over-priced, I was suspicious and avoided tasting it for a long time. When I did the simple fact that it tasted better to me than pretty much every previous NV was put down to the influence of the location and some kind of confirmation bias.

It wasn't until I took my partner out to celebrate her birthday and threw down enough cash to choke a middle-class donkey on a 2008 La Grande Année Bollinger that something changed. This wine was gorgeous, rich, perfectly balanced between acidity and enough malolactic fermentation to get a highland single malt drinker like me really interested. By far the best champagne I've consumed for under $500 and better in my mind than the '09 and '02.

It also tasted familiar, so familiar that the wine I was comparing it to left me feeling disappointed. No it wasn't the Cope-Williams Macedon NV.

It was the random bottle of reserve wine deemed "not good enough" for its own vintage, yet perfectly acceptable for blending into the next batch of Non-Vintage. From memory it came from the 2008 bin.

Not good enough...

Like the Welsh dragon on the label this winery hoards its gold, locks it away in a vault beneath a cricket pavilion and quietly wins its awards. There are no roosters on the property, no one crows or markets or sells.

In an industry driven by image and marketing more than product quality (sorry Dom) it's hard to know whether to celebrate a winery like this. Are they doing it for us the consumers, or for themselves, or for some kind of ego that's bigger than them? Should you just put every award and trophy sticker on the bottle and let customers go "oooh" and "ahhhh"?

In the case of Cope-Williams Macedon NV as a wine it's well-priced, phenomenal in both flavour and structure, and you know that it isn't about the label but what's actually in the bottle. Put a renowned label on one of these bottles and you'd easily pay $90-$200. As it stands, this is probably the best NV sparkling Australia produces and out-performs every big name NV champagne. Absolute bargain and hardly anyone knows about it.

If you're curious maybe get in touch at http://copewilliams.com.au/contact/