Join the CSIRO Wine Tasting group at Lindfield

Would you like to participate and taste wines from Australia and around the world?

The CSIRO wine tasting group that was formerly based at North Ryde has recently moved to West Lindfield due to the closure of the North Ryde Food Science facility.  With the move to the new venue, we would like to invite local alumni to come and join in.

How the group operates:

We currently hold tastings in the West Lindfield cafeteria/canteen on a Friday evening starting at around 5pm. The wines for the tastings are obtained by a volunteer presenter who can just buy the wines (usually 4 or 5 bottles) from a bottle shop or if they have a cellar, they can delve into their collection.  Mostly, but not always, the presenter comes up with a theme to the wines being tasted. Costs incurred by the presenter are reimbursed from the group kitty.  Attendees usually pay $10 each into the kitty, which also pays for some cheeses and biscuits, etc. to go with the wines.

The choice of date is usually up to the person presenting the wines, so tastings can be any Friday in a month; however, the tastings seem to mostly fall on the 2nd or 3rd Friday. Each tasting usually takes between one to one and a half hours.  Additionally, those that want to will often have dinner at a nearby restaurant after the tasting.

The final tasting of the year in December is usually a dinner event when we go to a restaurant and have an evening of food and wine.  Due to holidays etc. we generally don’t do tastings in January.

Some background/history:

The group was originally formed around 1988-89 by a number of wine enthusiast staff at the then CSIRO Division of Food Processing at North Ryde.  The initial plan for the group was to meet once a month to taste a series of wines that were provided by one of the members with a theme of that member’s choice.  All attending members contributed to a kitty that was then used to reimburse those members of the group that presented wines.  A small accumulated profit allowed the group to occasionally splash out on more expensive wines such as Champagne etc.  Up until the mid-1990s the organising was quite informal, mostly being carried out by the person presenting, at this time the job of being organiser devolved onto one person which is how it continues today. As you can see from the paragraph above, the initial format that was originally decided on has continued to this day, some 33 years later, with more than 320 tastings held and in excess of 1500 wines having been tasted.

If you would like to be involved or would like a bit more information, please email:

Nick Charley (nick.charley@gmail.com)