Over its 20-year history, Belgian electronic dance music festival Tomorrowland has hosted top-tier Australian artists including Pendulum, Dom Dolla, Timmy Trumpet and the Aston Shuffle. That trend continues with homegrown talents Fisher and NERVO both returning to the festival in 2025. But those veteran producers won’t be the only ones repping the green and gold in Antwerp this year: joining them will be a new Aussie trio that have been patiently waiting to make their festival debut.
This trio are the first three wines – a rosé, chardonnay and shiraz – being released under the Acta Non Verba banner, a new wine collaboration between Tomorrowland and Adelaide Hills winery Anvers Wines.
A global dance music juggernaut launching a wine brand with a family-owned South Australian winery was not on my 2025 bingo card. While the collaboration might seem like it came out of left field, there are plenty of synergies between both parties, not least their shared heritage.
As your nearest Francophone will attest, Anvers is the French name for Antwerp. The reason why Anvers’s husband-and-wife owners Wayne and Miriam Keoghan decided to name their 16-hectare estate after Belgium’s upwardly mobile “second city” is because that’s where Mount Isa-born Wayne met his future wife while travelling in the early ’80s.
Anvers’s Belgian importer Artevino put the Keoghans’ wines in front of the Tomorrowland crew; the Tomorrowland crew put Anvers’s 2016 vintage of The Warrior shiraz on the wine list at their (now-shuttered) Mesa restaurant in Antwerp; and guests’ response to the plush-yet-restrained South Aussie red put the idea of a joint venture in the heads of the Tomorrowland brains trust. (While dance music might be Tomorrowland’s bread and butter, thoughtful food and drink offerings, plus team-ups with high-profile chefs, are also part of the brand’s identity.)
But why would Belgian-based festival organisers make wine with someone on the other side of the world? Considering that Belgium borders France and Germany, and is a short flight from Italy and Spain, surely it would be easier – not to mention cheaper – to join forces with someone in a traditional European winemaking nation? (To be fair, in 2020 the festival did launch Solo Vida, a sparkling wine joint venture with Spanish cava pioneers Vallformosa.)
Perhaps. But according to Michiel Fosseprez, a Tomorrowland sales and licensing executive, partnering with Anvers chimed with the organisation’s interests in good living as well as building global communities. Sure, the Belgian connection helped, but equally appealing was the chance to challenge misconceptions that some people had about Aussie wine.
“In Europe, there’s a prejudice about Australian wines that they will be really bold and really outspoken and only appeal to a small market,” says Fosseprez, who flew from Belgium to Adelaide for the range’s launch. “But [the Acta Non Verba wines] are so well balanced, elegant and easy to drink. They’re also gastronomic, which is exactly what we’re aiming for and want to serve at the festival.”
Both camps are quick to stress that Acta Non Verba is no opportunistic, stick-a-Tomorrowland-label-on-an-Anvers-wine marketing exercise. There were regular trips between Antwerp and Adelaide for the project’s key players. Other than some Langhorne Creek fruit in the shiraz, all the wines are made using hand-picked grapes grown on the Keoghans’ Kangarilla property. The wines themselves also suggest that everyone involved are putting best feet forward.
Made from shiraz grapes, the dry, grippy rosé is a study in strawberry-based refreshment. There’s a voluptuousness to the chardonnay that calls to mind the power of the white burgundies of the Meursault region (most of the clones used in this wine are traceable to Burgundy, widely regarded as the spiritual home of chardonnay) yet still tastes undoubtedly like a wine born and raised in Australia. The shiraz, meanwhile, manages to squeeze plenty of plum and cool spice character into its well-proportioned, medium-bodied frame.
Following the wines’ Australian launch on Thursday, Acta Non Verba makes its global debut later this month at Tomorrowland Winter, a week-long festival held at French ski resort Alpe d’Huez. After that, the wines head to the big show (Tomorrowland Belgium) over the last two weekends in July, then it’s onto Tomorrowland Brasil in October.
When compared to the output of renegade vignerons making single-barrel and other equally minuscule-quantity wines, the production figures of Acta Non Verba’s launch range (3000 bottles of shiraz, 4800 of chardonnay, 10,000 of rosé) might not immediately scream “limited edition”. But when considered in the context of the festival’s crowd size (the 400,000 tickets to the July event sold out in hours) and online presence, demand will likely exceed supply.
And although 80 per cent of the wine is going to Europe – with half of that set aside for the festival and the rest to be sold through Tomorrowland’s online store and retail channels – the remainder of the production is staying in SA and is available to buy online for drinkers in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
The wines are also available at the Anvers cellar door: a sharply designed space that’s as notable for its Instagrammability as it is a sleek restaurant where chef Cameron Hynd’s assured cooking is matched tit-for-tat by equally polished service under restaurant manager Chris Howard, long-serving waiter Emily Edison and the rest of the warm front-of-house crew.
Acta Non Verba wines are available online at actanonverbawines.com and at Tomorrowland events.
