Halliday’s Last Book Logs 140 Wine Dinners Since 1970

Last updated: September 30, 2026

At 87, James Halliday has signed off on his last wine project. His farewell hardback, a 430-page tome, walks through 140 evenings and close to 2,200 bottles poured between 1970 and 2020. Grand cru Burgundy, classed growth Bordeaux, top Australian labels and Prime Ministers all show up in the pages.

Halliday called the work "leisurely" in conversation with db, which undersells the scale. The totals include hundreds of bottles from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, alongside dozens each from Château Lafite and Château Latour.

How the evenings actually ran

The whole setup was loose on purpose. Halliday and his late friend Len Evans AO OBE treated these gatherings as mates first, critics second. Evans would drop a note to a tight group, around 20 people who cheerfully called themselves "dreadful snobs," asking who could make it. On the night, the cost of the bottles, the room hire and any sourcing fees got split evenly. The host also cracked open bottles from his private reserves, so guests paid a fraction of what those bottles would fetch on the open market. As the years passed, the structure tightened and several formats appeared, including an "options" game and evenings built around a single bottle. One rule survived every decade: no repeat. If an evening worked, it was never redone. That sense of a one-shot moment is a big part of the appeal.

How the cellar got built

Sourcing bottles of this calibre in 1970s Australia was a real operation. Auction houses became the main supply line, with Christie's the preferred route, and prime cases often got hand-carried home from the estates themselves. The result was one of the most serious private collections in the country. At its height, the cellar ran to around 11,000 bottles, including several thousand from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Halliday confirmed to db that a lot of the bottles poured at these gatherings came straight from his own stock, even though the printed pages skip that detail.

Why it matters

Read end to end, the book is less a tasting note and more a record of how a country teaches itself to drink. In 1970, Australia was still mostly on fortified. Halliday and Evans dragged the local scene into the fine wine conversation through repetition, obsession and a stubborn refusal to stage the same evening twice. That a final volume exists at all is a gift to anyone who cares how wine culture actually gets built.

The practical lesson is hospitality-led wine education. These evenings worked because they were social, regular and built on trust. That template is portable: any serious wine bar or private cellar group can adapt the format. The trade-off is the cost. Building a cellar of this depth requires decades of access, capital and relationships that most operators simply cannot replicate. What they can borrow is the structure—the options games, the single-bottle nights, the clear rule about never repeating a lineup.

Who wins? Wine history enthusiasts, Burgundy obsessives and anyone curious about how Australian fine wine culture got its footing. Who loses? Nobody, though this is a closing chapter rather than an opening move.

What to watch next

Watch the Halliday Wine Companion brand, which continues beyond Halliday's retirement in 2024. Watch for any further public appearances from Halliday himself, who told db he does not love video interviews but still held a 90-minute Zoom call. Watch whether the dinner series finds a successor, or whether it quietly fades. The format is portable and the audience is hungry for it—someone will likely pick up the thread.

Key takeaways

• 140 evenings and around 2,200 bottles get documented across 430 pages.
• Halliday's personal stock peaked at roughly 11,000 bottles.
• Len Evans AO OBE and Halliday shaped Australia's fine wine culture over decades.
• No evening was ever restaged, even the strongest ones.
• The book omits that many bottles came from Halliday's own cellar.

Source: thedrinksbusiness.com