Introducing The Circular Vintage: A collaboration with Hyatt Regency Sydney

April 2025

We have teamed up with Hyatt Regency Sydney to transform food waste from the hotel into something that nourishes our vines and then those vines making a wine that we return to the hotel – the Circular Vintage!

Here is a video that gives you an overview of how the collaboration works.

How the circle works

Organic kitchen waste from the Hyatt Regency goes into the Modular Infrastructure for Biological Services (MIB) unit — a compact, shipping container style, robot-controlled system installed in the hotel’s basement. Inside it, millions of black soldier fly larvae get to work, consuming the scraps and producing nutrient-rich frass or fertiliser. We take that frass and spread it below our vines in Murrumbateman. The grapes grown with it become wine that is poured at the very hotel where the whole cycle began.

Nothing is wasted. The larvae themselves, having grown rapidly through their feeding cycle, go on to become protein for poultry.

For us, this was about playing our small part in closing the loop between food, farming and wine.

The Circular Vintage series launches with two wines, both grown on vines nourished by the frass fertiliser. A 2025 Shiraz that is available now and a 2026 Riesling that will be released in August this year.

The wines will be poured at the Hyatt Regency Sydney’s restaurant and lounge bar — the very place where their story began.

We also have a small number of bottles available on our website.

How a small vineyard ended up working with Australia’s largest hotel

You might be wondering how a small vineyard in the Canberra District came to be working with Australia’s largest hotel.

The connection goes back to 2017, and it started with insects.

Olympia Yarger, CEO and founder of GoTerra, a waste technology business that uses insects to break down waste, contacted us about our grape marc — the skins and seeds left over after pressing. Olympia wanted to feed the marc to black soldier fly larvae.

As two women in business with kids a similar age we found we had a lot in common, and we stayed in touch.

Years later, Olympia was working with the Hyatt Regency Sydney, where GoTerra’s black soldier fly larvae break down the hotel’s food waste. The by-product of that process is frass — essentially, the larvae’s manure, and a useful soil input.

Olympia thought Four Winds would be a good place to put this fertilizer to use. That’s how the loop closed: food waste from a Sydney hotel, processed by insects, spread on our vines in the Canberra District.

We spread the first batch of frass in 2024, ahead of the 2025 vintage, and again for the 2026 vintage.

What started as a grape marc pickup in 2017 has become a collaboration between Four Winds Vineyard and the Hyatt Regency Sydney — turning waste from one end of the supply chain into an input at the other.