Dan Coward

When not tasting or drinking wine, Dan has spent much of his career trying to figure out how 
to communicate, educate, enlighten and generally make wine both fun and accessible. He got 
his grounding at Adelaide University in 2003 where he completed the Graduate Diploma in 
Wine Business, before working in the Barossa and then briefly in the US. The big break came 
back in London when he joined Bibendum and worked (and played) hard with some of the 
most creative wine marketers around. After meeting his Aussie wife in London, Dan moved to 
Sydney and then Adelaide, where he now lives with Gemma and daughter, Olive.

In Australia, Dan kept going on about wine to anyone that would listen, writing the monthly 
‘Happy Hour’ drinks pages in the SBS magazine, Feast, for three years. He was also a video 
presenter on the online wine community, Spitbucket, and led masterclasses in the A+ 
Australian Wine Bar at the Good Food and Wine Shows nationally. In 2014 he and a business 
partner cooked up their own wine brand – Tonic Wines – which started as a side project and 
then grew and grew. He sold his share in the business to his partner at the end of 2019 but 
continues to rack up new business ideas…even when there’s no time to execute them.

After focusing on marketing and comms with Bibendum, Dan started in Sydney with 
importer/distributor Fine Wine Partners doing more of the same before he transitioned into 
fine wine sales and sales management. When the move to Adelaide came he got the chance 
(finally!) to work a vintage at Shaw + Smith in the Adelaide Hills. His cellarhand skills were 
questionable at best, so he was happy to take up a national sales role for Shaw+ Smith, 
Tolpuddle Vineyard and The Other Wine Co. when the opportunity presented itself.

After six very educational and happy years working in the Hills and travelling the length and 
breadth of Australian hospitality he struck out in another new direction, helping to build up a 
new brand and wine busines in the Barossa Valley from scratch. It’s called Alkina and it might 
just help to change the way many Australians think about terroir. Like a proper nerd, he’s 
pumped to be learning heaps of new stuff: about rocks, about agricultural regeneration, about 
biodynamics and about the anatomy and philosophy of taste and tasting. He sees Alkina as a 
place where wine quality and character, story-telling, the environment, hospitality, community 
and kindness will all be seamlessly interwoven into the fabric of the business. It may not be 
easy, but then great things rarely are….