Two extraordinary Chardonnays
The big news this year is all about two wonderful vintages of Chardonnay, being the 2010 and 2011. As I mentioned in the tasting notes, the 2010 Chardonnay is the first to be completely fermented and aged in our underground maturation cave. I am beginning to see a real difference in the wines that have been fermented in the cave. They seem to sail through almost two years of barrel age retaining beautiful freshness and vibrancy. With humidity always over 90 percent and a relatively constant temperature of 15 degrees we are finding the ageing process is now much slower and more gentle – under these conditions the wines tend to lose a small amount of alcohol and gain further refinement, rather than gaining alcohol as they do in a less humid cellar.
The 2011 vintage was one of the coolest for many seasons with much higher than average rainfall thrown in for good measure. Due to the challenging conditions many regions had high losses due to Downy Mildew and Botrytis. While we also had our fair share of these conditions, careful vineyard work enabled us to keep this mostly under control. This season has resulted in exceptionally fine wines though they have still retained good depth and complexity. The only disappointment was Pinot Noir and the 2011 may be offered under our McClay Road label at a later stage, depending on how this wine develops in barrel.
The Shirazes have lived up to expectations, in fact the 2010 Estate Vineyard Shiraz has continued to improve in terms of complexity as this vineyard becomes more established. While the cooler 2011 vintage has resulted in a finer structure at this stage I expect that by this time next year they will have richened and deepened considerably.
2011 will be the first vintage to show the results of some improvements in our red winemaking techniques. Without going into great detail this includes a little more use of whole bunch fermentation in some cases. This will be further enhanced in the upcoming vintage with the replacement of some of our winery processing equipment - with the very latest machinery developed in Narbonne, Southern France.
For those of you who are Pinot Noir fans, our new small planting of MV6 Pinot Noir vines is progressing well. This planting will help boost our production slightly and hopefully bring an extra dimension to this wine within the next few years.
Many of you will have seen reviews of our wines in the March and November issues of Decanter Magazine this year. We were very pleased to receive a top equal rating for the Estate Vineyard Chardonnay in what was a very comprehensive tasting of 116 wines! The Warner Vineyard Shiraz also ranked well and we noted this as the top cool climate Shiraz with a total of 256 wines being tasted. If you have not already seen these issues I recommend them as very interesting reading.
Some of my comments in the most recent issue of Decanter discuss various aspects of the Australian wine industry and Australian wine styles. Although they will have been considered controversial by some I'm glad they have found resonance with most of you.
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.
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