About Us

Just a heads-up - this is a long ‘about’ page, but it’s worth it. We like to give context, and it’s important to understand how all this came to be and why we do what we do. So, grab a big glass of something delicious and settle in…

We created the ’fo in a little garage in Adelaide back in 2011, and in just over 10 years we’ve grown to a tribe of over 500,000 wine-loving mofos around the world. It's been quite the adventure.

We love wine, and we wanted to build a place we thought we’d love to buy wine from, and hang out with other people who love wine. This has become our mission. 

Our mission

• Unite a tribe with our love of wine, food and adventure.

• Be proud of what we do, and our impact on the world.

• And have fun.

Unite a tribe with our love of wine, food and adventure.

Good wine is more than just flavour and texture. It’s friends and family and laughter and memories. Wine is history and culture, it’s science and poetry, and something else almost entirely magical.

Good wine is stories... in the making of the wine, and in the sharing. Your stories. The stories we make together. 

But it’s also just a drink – a delicious drink, that can bring food alive and make you smile and feel something. Good wine should never be intimidating, or the domain of a few self-proclaimed ‘connoisseurs’ – that’s all just bowties and bullshit, and those days are gone.

We want to unite a tribe of people who love not only wine, but food and the adventure of experiencing it all. This life we have the privilege to live is worth celebrating and that’s what we want to do. That, we think, is a worthy purpose.  

We want to be proud of what we do and our impact on the world.

This means not only being proud of what we achieve, but how we go about it.

Because good wine is an experience. Like good food, good music, good company, it adds colour and flavour to life, a layer of richness that just makes it all.

We’re building a global organisation that will be remembered for its positive impact on the planet and its people.

And we want to help the makers sustain and grow their businesses, so they can keep making good wine.

With supermarkets focusing more and more on homogenised, own-brand wines, we’re facing the future decline of good wines with provenance, character and stories. Real wine. Which means a lot of people won’t be able to experience good wine, and a lot of great producers will go out of business.

This is not what the drinkers want, and it’s not what the makers want, and we don’t intend to let that happen.

And have fun.

It is wine, after all, and if we’re not having fun, we’re not doing it right.

Right then, now that we’ve established why we do what we do, let’s look at what it is we do and how we do it…

Good wine only

We work directly with the best producers in the world to find the wines we love, and curate them to your taste.

These are the wines WE drink. If we don’t love it, we don’t sell it. Less than 5% of wines that cross our tasting bench actually make it to the ’fo.

It’s true, our office at Mofo HQ does resemble a wine bar more than an office most of the time. Every day our team are tasting wines to find the gems - those wines that stop you in your tracks and wines we know you’ll love. It doesn’t happen often but when it does, you’ll know about it. 

Mofo value

With the most awesome tribe of wine-loving members in the country, we have the buying power to blow the next best market price out of the water.

This means you get to drink only the best wines for a price that cannot be matched. We think that’s pretty exciting.

Happiness, guaranteed

We give the kind of experience we’d all like to have. Simple, honest. No bowties and bullshit. One click, and wine’s on your doorstep. 

We welcome you into our world - of good wine, good food and good people embracing, sharing and celebrating this adventure called life. 

We won’t bore you by rattling off a shopping list of obscure flavour characteristics that mean nothing to you. We will respect the wine however and give you all the info you need, but we’d rather tell a story and give you an insight to why we love this wine. Great wine is about so much more than its components, we’ll tell those stories.  

That’s the experience you get at the ’fo. This is a place where wine is fun and the world is full of flavour. And we stand behind everything we do.

The mofo 100% happiness guarantee

At the ’fo, we want you to enjoy your wines. And of course we want you to keep coming back for more, and to tell all your friends about us.

We only sell the wines we love and drink ourselves, so WE think the wines are awesome, but everyone has their own tastes. So if you’re not happy with a wine you order from the ’fo, and it’s been less than a year since delivery, let us know. If you’ve opened two bottles or less in a case of twelve, or one in a case of six, we can organise pickup and give you a full credit or refund — you choose. If you’ve opened more, or we’re talking about a mixed case, just contact us and we’ll figure something out.

In any case, if you get a bottle you’re not thrilled with, please contact us. We really do want you to be 100% happy. In fact, we guarantee it.

The mofo tribe

Vinomofo represents the most awesome tribe of wine lovers in the world, so you're in good company.

We represent a revolution against the bowties and bullshit of the wine snobs and posers who think wine is for the chosen few elite and educated. It’s not. We think everybody should be able to enjoy good wine, without feeling intimidated. 

The way people engage with wine now has changed and that’s a good thing. We want you to feel comfortable to share, to learn, to enjoy wine with us. 

It’s free to join, but we ask you to respect the community, and respect the amazing producers who share their wines with us. They are legends, and we all have to do our bit to help sustain and grow their businesses, so they can keep making awesome wines.

Basically, it all comes down to keeping it real, doing the right thing – by us, our producers and each other.

One of the coolest things about Vinomofo are our Black Market deals — these are deals so epic on wines so awesome that the only way we can get our hands on them is by agreeing to keep the identity of the wine and the producer secret. They’re happy for you to drink them, but they don’t want to see them advertised anywhere at that price.

We ask you to keep that secret with us, so that we all get to keep enjoying them. If we blow it, we won’t be able to get these deals anymore. It’s pretty simple, and very important.

The mofo story

Though Vinomofo was launched in 2011, it really started life back in 2007 in the garage of brothers-in-law and fellow wine geeks, Justin Dry and Andre Eikmeier, who just wanted to do something cool for wine lovers and producers.

Andre was excited by the ‘voice of the people, the idea of real people rating and reviewing wines and sharing their recommendations, and Justin had discovered Facebook whilst travelling in South America, and wanted to create a social network for wine nerds.

They shared a belief that wine should not be about ‘bowties and bullshit’, and on Christmas Eve 2006, no doubt after a few vinos, they decided to start a business together (brothers in law — what could possibly go wrong?). A few months later, Qwoff was born — Australia’s first online wine community site.

But more than a site, a tribe was born. A tribe of Qwoffers. They were given a voice through the site, and through the brand new social media platforms of Facebook and Twitter. People were rating and reviewing the wines they were drinking, sharing their discoveries, recommending wines to their friends.

Wine producers were excited about getting their wines in front of the Qwoffers, but they weren’t so keen on the idea of paying anything to do so, and the boys soon found themselves struggling to pay the bills, let alone support their families. In fact, by Christmas 2008 they were stone broke, and under real pressure to give it all up and go and get jobs.

But they stuck at it, and in May 2009 they found an angel investor willing to put a bit of money in to see where the business could go. They moved out of their garage and set up a cool warehouse space in an old restored brewery in Hindmarsh, Adelaide, and hired their first employee, a developer named Oli.

Now Justin had always dreamed of traveling the country in a Kombi, surfing and drinking local wines from Margaret River to McLaren Vale, so later in 2009 they bought a beaten-up old Kombi that was abandoned in a lemon orchard in the Barossa (the irony, should have read the signs!) and started on a great wine adventure, filming it all in a Youtube show called Road to Vino. It was on that journey that they made friends with some of the greatest producers and wine personalities of Australia.

It was a lot of fun, an amazing ride, but still not many people were prepared to pay them to do what they were so passionate about. The angel capital ran out, things got tough again, and by the end of 2010, the boys were faced again with the choice to either come up with a new plan that would actually make money, or give it all up.

It was coming back from a short Christmas break made particularly stressful and emotional by the fact that after nearly four years of trying, they were broke again (only this time with a lease and staff to pay), that Justin came into the office with a new idea: “Let’s start a wine deals site”.

Andre didn’t like it at first — he was worried that selling wine would be selling out, that it would be betraying their Qwoffers and their promise to recommend only wines they genuinely loved.

In the end, they asked their tribe how they would feel about it.

And so Justin and Andre teamed up with another aspiring young wine entrepreneur, Barossa boy Leigh Morgan, and together they launched Vinomofo on April 12, 2011.

Or as it was then called....Vinomojo.