Wine prices are getting out of hand
This year I’m going to start with a raised eyebrow about pricing. Many people, including our own customers, comment that the price of Giaconda Estate Vineyard Chardonnay is well undervalued. This wine has a proven track record and is considered one of the few grand cru alternatives that is available from the new world (at this price and quality). However, we have resisted the push towards higher pricing and there will be only a small increase this year, which considers inflation and rising costs. I think wine prices are generally getting out of hand, and I speak about chardonnay in particular, having seen one Australian example for $600! There is now a spate of chardonnays above $200 heading towards $350. These prices simply encourage other producers to be cavalier with their pricing, regardless of the quality.
I do a lot of blind tasting with friends and family and we see a very mixed bag out there. There are lots of people, especially some new younger vignerons who are making good and interesting wines at fair prices. On the other hand, some egos seem apparent with people making too many wines at too high prices and quality that is, in my opinion, questionable. I hope my longstanding policy of not bowing to fashion and only making the wines that I like to drink, continues to be appreciated. I do worry that our wines are no longer accessible to some of our longstanding customers. If any of you are in this situation, please feel free to discuss with me.
Continuing with Chardonnay, we have had a great run of vintages since 2010 with the recent succession of three La Niña seasons probably the best of all. Pointing to this, Antonio Galloni (of www.vinous.com) has given our 2022 vintage the best white wine in the world but admittedly only 35,000 were tasted! I consider 2023 to be an exceptional release from a cooler vintage and you’ll find a link to the tasting notes below. The input from my son, Nathan and Vineyard Manager, Casey, has been invaluable in lifting the overall quality of our wines. This frees me up to concentrate on creative ideas to further improve both our viticulture and winemaking.
I'm also very encouraged by the 2023 Estate Vineyard Roussanne, which is an exceptional follow on from its maiden 2022 vintage. This variety is planted on our warm north-facing amphitheatre block and is steadily improving as we learn how to manage the new site and experiment a little with the fermentation and barrel regimes. We are gradually finding the best vineyard management practices and crop level for this vineyard, to bring power and concentration while maintaining refinement.
Our secondary vineyard site in Beechworth is dedicated to Nebbiolo and this is going from strength to strength. The majority of this vineyard is now 15 years old and I consider the new release from 2022 to be our best to date. A well-known wine critic (considered an expert on Nebbiolo) has reinforced this opinion and you will find more information on this in the tasting notes linked below. As with all the red wines, this is now fermented entirely in terracotta amphorae and benefits from a component of extended maceration.
While the La Niña vintages have been beneficial for most of our varieties, there will be no Estate Vineyard Shiraz offered this year. The 2023 season was much too cool for this variety. In addition, we experienced record low yields across all varieties. This mostly effects Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and our offering in terms of quantities will be greatly reduced during the release this year. Please expect all the wines to sell out very quickly on April 15th.
The Future:
All this has led me to review what we do and play to our strengths. This vineyard, and in fact much of this area, really excels for white wine. We have planted more chardonnay here at the Estate Vineyard with the express purpose to produce our second label Nantua Chardonnay entirely from estate grown fruit. There will be one final release of this wine next year from fruit bought in from neighbouring vineyards and blended with a small component of Giaconda fruit. After this, Nantua Chardonnay will be sourced solely from the estate.
There is also a small plot of Pinot Noir in the cooler and more humid part of our vineyard which has been inter-row planted this season which doubles the vineyard planting density. The intention is that this should foster more competition amongst those vines and lead to greater quality. Look out for some interesting pinot noir wines from us in future years.
In other news we are considering to finish making shiraz here at the Estate and graft those vines over to more Roussanne and Chardonnay. This is not a fait accompli, however we will keep you updated on this project in future newsletters, once those decisions have been made.
Read the current release tasting notes.
Salut,
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 >