Winemakers: when will they be famous?

I’d like to think that wine doesn’t really do celebrity. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely out of touch with the real (or at least, the increasingly online and surreal) world where, clearly, wine is far from immune to the mercurial, sometimes transformative effects of a high-wattage celebrity endorsement. A seconds-long appearance of a bottle of Domaine de Terres Blanches Sancerre deep into Taylor Swift’s The End of an Era documentary series, for example, was all it took for Swift’s fans to clear the wine merchants’ shelves of this Loire Valley sauvignon blanc in what sounds like a matter of hours earlier this year.

Wine also has a ripening bunch of apparently very successful celebrity tie-in brands, many of which – Graham Norton, Kylie Minogue, Gary Barlow, Gordon Ramsay, Sarah Jessica Parker and, most recently, teetotal Elton John’s 0% alcohol blanc de blancs fizz – are put together by a single UK-based firm, Benchmark Drinks, run by the canny Australian wine industry veteran, Paul Schaafsma.

And then there are the celebrity vanity project/tax write-off vineyards and châteaux – a curious cast that runs from slightly faded pop-rock stars, such as Sting (Tuscany) and Pink (California), to Hollywood types such as John Malkovich, Ridley Scott (both have estates in southern France’s Luberon) and pre-split Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (Château Miraval in Provence).

What wine doesn’t have, however, is its own, homegrown mainstream celebrities, bona fide breakout stars and popular cultural figures who could be relied on to provide a circa-50-point Pointless answer in the way that dozens of chefs I can think of could. The most obvious candidates – winemakers – are almost always far less well-known than the estates they work for. I’m not even sure how many committed enthusiasts and collectors could name the winemakers of world-famous Bordeaux and Burgundy wines such as Château Lafite-Rothschild and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, never mind the people behind big brands like Barefoot, Hardys and Yellow Tail.

Still, there are plenty of winemakers whose names, spelled out on the front labels of widely distributed wines, are well-known, even if only a fraction of those buying their bottles would be able to put a face to them or be sure if they refer to a living person or some long-gone estate-founding patriarch or matriarch. Certainly, while they’re not and never will be on household first-name terms with the public in the way of Jamie, Nigella or Nigel (let alone sauvignon-loving Taylor, Charli and Rosalía), I suspect the likes of Argentina’s Susana Balbo, the Languedoc’s Gérard Bertrand, Spain’s Telmo Rodríguez, South Africa’s Adi Badenhorst and Australia’s David Hohnen will cause at least a shiver of recognition for some readers.

Hohnen is an interesting case, since one of the wines he’s involved in – an exuberantly blackberry-juicy rioja red Hohnen X Bodega La Eralta NV (£10, or £8.50 with a Nectar card, Sainsbury’s; £10.50, ocado.com) – is very much sold on both Hohnen’s reputation as a winemaker (which goes back to his role in the creation of Western Australia’s Cape Mentelle in the 1970s, and cult New Zealand sauvignon blanc Cloudy Bay in the 1980s) and his down-to-earth antipodean charm. “A fustercluck of fruit,” says the marketing. “Smooth AF new age Rioja, blended across selected vintages, with love, from Dave Hohnen.”

Hohnen’s name also graces the labels, alongside that of co-founder Murray McHenry, of some top-notch bottles from the duo’s estate in Western Australia’s Margaret River. And in my ideal world, the maker of a wine such as the vibrantly verdant dry white McHenry Hohnen Rocky Road Sauvignon Semillon 2024 (£17.90, Tanners) – or for that matter the zippy-but-fleshy AA Badenhorst The Curator White Blend, Swartland, South Africa 2024 (£10, Waitrose) and the seductive, rich but fresh M&S Collection Susana Balbo Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina 2024 (£14) – would be as famous as any pop star.