Five Minutes With Doom Juice, the Slightly Satanic Inner West Winery With Super “Quaffable” Drops

“We’re here in the Riverland after vintage 2025,” Doom Juice co-founder Zachary Godbolt tells Broadsheet. “We were up late last night picking some cabernet, and now we’re up pretty early this morning – it’s about 6am.”

“It’s gonna be hot, hot, hot today,” co-founder Sebastian Keys chimes in. The boys are at Ricca Terra, one of the South Australian growers they work with for their expanding range of natty wines.

The pair launched the wine label in 2020, and have learnt a lot since. Mostly: how to make wine. They’ve also hosted events, opened (and closed) cellar doors, made merch (tees! Caps! Rhinestone belts! Condoms!) and collaborated with other creatives (like psychedelic florists and tattoo parlours.

Watch: We had a chat with Sebastian Keys and Zachary Godbolt about the best bits, the challenging bits and what comes next for Doom Juice.

Hey team, tell us how Doom Juice came to be.
Godbolt: We started Doom juice because we wanted to make wine for the people. Wine that was accessible, wine that was not stuffy or gatekept – wine that we wanted to drink.

Give us a rundown of your range.
Keys: So we’ve got six wines in the range. We have our fizz, our rosé, our white wine – Weiss – [and our] Rouge chilled red. We have the La Rosa, a Mediterranean red, then our Skins, which is a cracking little orange operation. The cool thing about these wines is that we use wild fermentation on all the grapes. We use sustainably certified grapes, unfiltered and unfined. They’re just super smashable, easy drops – all of them.

Godbolt: Quaffable, baby. Quaffable.

What put Doom Juice on the map?
Godbolt: I think, for me, when we had the cellar door, I think that was just really cool.

Keys: It was our flagship venue where you’d showcase all the wines and you really got to speak to everyone.

Godbolt: It got super, super hyped as well. It was kinda crazy. It was in the Qantas in-flight magazine, which was quite shocking, because it was a fucking garage in the back of St Peters. Highlights as well: exporting wine. Like, pretty insane that we get to do that for our job and our living, so other people across the world can try our wines.

Working it all out on the job can be tricky. What’s the best thing you’ve learnt?
Godbolt: How to make wine.

Keys: Mate, making wine every year. And just getting better and better.

Godbolt: Every year, we’re more and more hands-on. At the start, you know, we were getting a lot of help to make it, and I think that … fuck you know, I didn’t have a clue how to make wine properly, until the last four years.

Keys: It’s been a great process, starting from a basic knowledge. Now going into our fifth, sixth vintage now, we are absolutely nailing every single little detail.

Have there been any catastrophes?
Godbolt: In 2021, we lost all of our rosé – which is a fair bit – to volatile acidity.

Keys: We turned a beautiful tank of rosé into nail polish remover.

Godbolt: It’s always good to learn those sort of things, I guess, earlier rather than later. And, you know, clean your tanks, kids.

This year you released two new wines, that I heard mark an evolution of Doom Juice. Are you growing up a bit?
Keys: We’re working with varieties, mostly, that we’ve never worked with before.

Godbolt: Like Mediterranean, which are beautifully grown out in the Riverland. And also, as well, we’re using processes that we’ve never done before. You know, we’re aging in oak, we are using a massive open-fermenter in that skinsy number.

Keys: I think it’s us doing things that are more experimental.

Godbolt: That’s the evolution – us learning new things. It’s cool, we have our little barrels now that have “Doom Juice” on them. We’re going to keep them for a little bit longer.

Keys: Add them to the next vintage.

Will the Satanism get toned down as you evolve?
Keys: No. No, it’s just going to ramp up.

Godbolt: You know, I don’t ever really want to upset anyone. And, you know, whatever walk of life they come from, and I understand that Satanism or satanic elements probably could, so I’m personally thinking to maybe tone it down a touch, but nothing [major].

Keys: It’ll still be around. It’s just for a laugh.

Godbolt: Yeah, we just want to do something different, really, with wine. I think that wine has been pretty traditional in most parts for a while, when it comes to branding. So you know, why not shake it up a bit?

You’ve got funky merch and collaborated with a bunch of creatives – will Doom Juice always extend beyond the wine?
Godbolt: Doom Juice will definitely always go beyond just wine. You know, that’s why we started it. The whole purpose is that we can have fun with it and be able to have the pleasure to collaborate with artists and creatives and, you know, to do cool shit. Like, that sounds cliche, but, you know, if we want to make a bloody rhinestone belt, we’ll make one with one of our homies that does that for a living. We just want to do things that are fun, you know? Like, why does craft beer get to have all the fun?

What’s next in the pipeline?
Keys: This year we actually have a new format coming out, with the Doom Bags.

Godbolt: When you open a bottle on a Tuesday night and you realise you probably have to drink the whole bottle, otherwise it’ll go off? Yeah, we’re solving that issue.

Keys: So you just have one crack at it and it’s fresh for 30 days. No glass, so a bit more sustainable there.

Godbolt: We got goon bags, baby.

Keys: Doom Bags.

Where can we get it?
Godbolt: Doom Juice is in some of the best bottle shops around the country. New South Wales, we have so many shops. It’s our home state. We work with the best of the best. I love them. You can also check online.

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