McClay Rd Shiraz
This year's release sees our McClay Rd wines being available on mail order for the first time - a rare opportunity to secure our Shiraz at a bargain price. It is a blend of all our three Shiraz; Warner Vineyard, Estate Vineyard and the joint-venture wine with Chapoutier, into one wine under the McClay Rd label. Thus this release contains all our best Shiraz made into a more ready-drinking style with less time in barrel and lower proportion of new oak. I feel this wine is worthy of your attention and represents great value for money. In the past we have reserved this label for small quantities of "culled barrels" and released it only into the wine trade. This release being of a much larger volume, representing the only Shiraz we have from 2009, we decided to give the mail order the chance to purchase. Even though this wine can be drunk at an earlier stage it still has significant body and will have very good ageing potential.
In addition to the Shiraz we are also offering 2008 McClay Rd Cabernet. I always felt that although this wine was good it didn't seem quite good enough for our normal Giaconda Cabernet label and thus I downgraded it to McClay Rd. I sometimes wonder why I did this as all early tasting reports on this wine have been extremely positive. So to all Cabernet lovers, don't miss out as quantities of this wine are very limited.
Meanwhile, I am totally happy with the 2009 Giaconda Cabernet released here.
You will notice that there is no 2010 Ergo Sum en primeur release. The reason for this being that from now on Ergo Sum will be marketed separately from Giaconda. We made a decision anyway not to do an en primeur release as the quantities of 2010 are still quite small as the vineyard is still being developed, thus no Ergo Sum will be released until next year.
Probably the most exciting news is that we have finally released the 2008 Nebbiolo, which will be bottled after sitting in a large Italian Bota for nearly three years! I will leave it all to Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW of Robert Parkers Wine Advocate and you can read her tasting notes under the release information. This neurotic wine has taught me some new things about grape growing and wine making.
Last but not least come the comments on the 2010 vintage and wines. It came as a great relief to finally have a really model vintage again, beautiful weather conditions have given us some great wines. The Chardonnay represents almost exactly where I like to be with this variety - focused and characterful, highly refined and elegant. All the 2010 wines are the first ones to be totally aged in our new underground cave and their tightness and elegance reflects these great ageing conditions - stable low temperature and high humidity.
The Shirazes are rather European styled, powerful yet ethereal. The Warner Vineyard Shiraz now has an established reputation and I am excited to feel that the Estate Vineyard now with a small Viognier component is rapidly following in it's footsteps with the current release wine.
The Pinot Noir represents the culmination of our Beechworth and Yarra Valley blend, complex and interesting, an Australian with true Burgundian overtones. I feel this wine is much greater than the sum of its two parts.
Early indications are very good for the 2011 vintage as I have not seen such a beautiful cool and wet spring for many years. The vineyard and surrounding countryside is such a picture of health at the moment that along with many other farmers I feel a sense of optimism and happiness.
In a first for us I am pleased to offer with this release, 'Inside Burgundy', a book by Jasper Morris MW. Jasper is a friend and has been the Giaconda agent in the UK for many years, as well as living in and writing about Burgundy.
Regards,
Rick Kinzbrunner
Jeremy Oliver's Wine of the Year - 2012 Estate Vineyard Shiraz!
01 November 2014Australian Wine Annual 2015 - Giaconda Estate Shiraz 2012 (98 points)
Since 1999 Rick Kinzbrunner has been fashioning cutting-edge cool climate Australian shiraz. Fifteen years ago there weren’t too many Victorians making this variety into a style we perhaps more associate with the northern Rhône Valley, but Kinzbrunner has always drawn inspiration from the wines he most enjoys drinking. So until 2008, the only Shiraz from Giaconda was the deliciously perfumed, floral, spicy and savoury Warner Vineyard Shiraz, which has been continually sourced from a sloping, north-facing section of the Warner Vineyard, 6.5 km from Beechworth and located at a marginally cooler, higher site than that of the Giaconda Vineyard itself. For many years I have rated this as a 5-Star wine.
It took a long time for Kinzbrunner to plant shiraz at Giaconda, since for the first decade and a half at his Beechworth site he was more concerned at matching different parcels of the property with chardonnay, pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon. But the consistent quality from the Warner site convinced him that a warmer, north-facing plot at the top of the property was just the place to plant two acres of shiraz, with Hermitage well and truly in his sights. In itself this was a radical but confident decision, because Kinzbrunner initially chose the predominantly south-facing property to reduce the impact of heat on its elevated but still warmish location.
Retarded by the extended drought of the first decade this century, the young shiraz vines struggled to develop and produce a crop, but in doing so dug their feet deep into the site’s granitic loam soils, which overlie decomposed gravel and clay. But when they came, the results were astonishing. The first wine from the new shiraz vines was the 2008 vintage, quickly affirming the site’s potential with what I described at the time as a ‘super Rhône’. It quickly revealed the layered, meaty and mineral attributes we now expect from the site. Kinzbrunner fine-tuned winemaking regimes for the next two vintages, exploring means by which to express the potential of the site’s terroir into anexpression of shiraz fit to rival the Rhône’s elite. Very closed and reductive in their youth, cloaked by layers of oak and tannin, the 2010 and 2011 releases delivered quality, but not enough to meet Kinzbrunner’s expectations, or even indeed the Warner Vineyard Shiraz in 2010. All that has changed with the 2012 vintage. Fermented in tank with a small proportion of viognier, it was matured in the mineshaft-like cellar under the Giaconda vineyard for 22 months inside French oak barrels, around a third of which were new. From its earliest days it looked special. Thankfully, it is safely into bottle for its real journey now to begin.
I like the fact that winemakers like Rick Kinzbrunner, Phillip Jones, Joe Grilli and Roman Bratasiuk are so honest and focused on their extraordinary ambitions. From the outset, Kinzbrunner started this project to make a wine worthy of the greatest sites of the northern Rhône, and he didn’t mind who he told about it. The clearest ambitions can carry with them the highest risk, but the risk can bring the reward.
In this case, the reward is a wine that does what Kinzbrunner has done before with chardonnay, and is also promising to do again with nebbiolo. It is taking the perceptions of what has been considered possible with Australian wine, spinning them about and exposing them for their shameful lack of imagination and inspiration. That’s what great winemakers do and why the Giaconda Estate Shiraz 2012 is such a worthy Wine of the Year.
Read more - 2012 Estate Vineyard Shiraz >