Giaconda to join La Place de Bordeaux
The big news here at Giaconda this year is on an International level – after many years of having been told we should receive more International exposure and recognition, we have been approached by agents for La Place de Bordeaux (an association of French Négociants) to distribute Giaconda wines Internationally.
Giaconda will now be marketed Internationally (except Australia and New Zealand) by Établissements Jean-Pierre Moueix (JP Moueix). JP Moueix are one of the most prestigious négociants worldwide and own several prestigious Châteaux including La Fleur-Pétrus. For many years they were also part owners and managers of Château Pétrus. This is a real coup for Giaconda being a very important decision for JP Moueix who have never had a non-french wine label in their portfolio (excluding their own winery Dominus in Napa Valley California). It will certainly elevate Giaconda to another level on the world stage!
On top of this our 2021 Estate Vineyard Chardonnay has recently gained a perfect 100 points rating by the Robert Parker Wine Advocate. As reviewed by Erin Larkin, this is the first Australian white table wine to ever receive this rating. Erin comments “This is an unbelievable wine that will only grow in stature over the coming years.” Read more >
I do understand and appreciate that Giaconda has many loyal and longstanding Australian supporters. As such, the domestic quantity and availability of our wines will not change substantially, except for an inevitable price rise this year. The new arrangement with JP Moueix is simply a consolidation of our existing export allocations.
Many of you will be aware, we missed the 2020 vintage due to the summer bushfires. Since then we have experienced several mild vintages which has resulted in excellent quality, however our vineyard yields have been well below average. Unfortunately this vintage follows the same pattern with even lower yields and this has caused us to cancel the 2022 En Primeur pre-orders for the time being.
Later this year we will be releasing the 2022 Nantua Chardonnay, an exceptional wine made from a blend of Warner Vineyard and Estate Vineyard fruit. We will send an email reminder to our mailing list once this is available to order (mid September). The chardonnay will be accompanied by an excellent release of Nantua Shiraz and Nantua Roussanne with more information to be revealed at the time of release.
This brings me to the subject of Shiraz and Roussanne. For the 2021 and 2022 vintages our shiraz is a blend of Estate Vineyard plus Warner Vineyard fruit made in a combination of small oak barrels, large Boti cask and Amphorae. This is a very rich and complex wine, certainly among the best ever produced here at Giaconda. The other exciting news will be the return of Giaconda Roussanne, formerly named 'Aeolia'. This fruit is now grown at our Estate Vineyard and the first release will be from 2022 (to be offered during the April release next year).
I am continuing our experiments with Terracotta Amphora for fermentation and we are beginning to see great results from the extended maceration. This tends to bring much more complexity and depth from the long maceration. The result with our 2019 Nebbiolo (current release) is truly spectacular! This wine was made in Amphora for the first year and then matured in older French barrels. The resulting wine is in a very traditional Barolo style so please be sure to decant and give it plenty of air! The ultimate aim for this wine is to use an equal blend of Amphora and large traditional Boti casks. Future releases of this wine will certainly be exciting.
View wine offer and read the tasting notes >
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.
Read more - 2012 Estate Vineyard Shiraz >