The good, the bad and the interesting
The good begins with the exceptional quality of our 2018 vintage releases this year. All four wines are right at the top of the quality ladder. After much feedback when the wines sold out incredibly quickly during the last release (the Chardonnay in 1 day) we have responded by scaling back some export markets to ensure more will be available for domestic website orders this year. Don't miss the varieties you favour, especially the chardonnay, as I believe this is equivalent of many Grand Cru Burgundies at a substantially cheaper price point. The pinot noir is the best for many years and the two shiraz wines are as good as we have ever made.
The bad is that there will be no wines produced by Giaconda from the 2020 vintage due to the adverse conditions experienced this summer. I decided not to try and make any second label wines of questionable quality and not to buy in fruit from any other regions. This reinforces a decision taken some time ago to move to purely Estate labelled wines of the highest quality. This is a continuation of my philosophy of doing less and doing better. This means that in April 2022 there will be little to offer, although we will release small quantities of recent museum wines along with some additional magnums and other rarities.
The interesting, an Amphora Roussanne, is just a little plaything for me although looking at the results this may become a regular project. This is my version of a 'natural' wine albeit not so oxidised and tired which can often mar a sense of place and variety with many other examples I have tried. This wine has a purposeful edge of development and wild characteristics of a natural inspired wine but still manages to speak of its identity while retaining purity and vibrancy. This wine was fermented and macerated on skins for 9 months in a beautiful Spanish Terracotta Amphora from Extremadura to the south-west of Madrid. Even more tantalising is the 2019 Nebbiolo, also fermented and aged 10 months in Amphora with whole bunches; skins, seeds and stalks. The result is a powerful and highly tannic yet very well integrated wine which now rests in old barrels. Stay posted as more details are to come in future newsletters. The Amphora is a fascinating vessel, as the wine develops and integrates in such a unique fashion.
A final comment. Many people say the price of Giaconda chardonnay is starting to look cheap on a price to quality ratio, especially when compared to white Burgundy. There are many expensive chardonnays on the market when compared to Giaconda and dare I say it, not as good (in my opinion of course). This is to say if you want to drink a classic white Burgundy style, we are in good company as this is what I like to drink also. I make wines that I enjoy and don't pander to the current fashion of tight, pure (often boring), acid driven, lightweight wines. Equally for the reds, we are seeing many very high priced Cuvée of questionable quality. The antidote to this, and in times of hardship, we are committed to holding Giaconda wine prices stable for the time being and ensuring our wines remain accessible.
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Yours sincerely,
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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