Our wines

This sumptuous but evenly balanced chardonnay unfolds a complex, smoky bouquet whose fresh grapefruit, melon and white peach-like aromas are tightly knit with scents of matchstick and mineral, smoked meats and buttery, nougat-like vanilla oak backed by suggestions of musk, cinnamon and rose water. It’s long and lustrous, with sappy, mouthwatering flavours of melon, lemon and grapefruit oil seamlessly integrated into a unctuous but tightly focused palate that finishes with a gentle, soft acidity. It might lack the raw emphasis of recent vintages, but is clearly from the same site and is almost certain to develop more strength and character.

Jeremy Oliver, Australian Wine Annual 2015, 97 points

Gleaming green-gold; the bouquet has the hallmark edge of struck flint, adding immeasurably to its complexity, but also laying the way for the palate to follow; here is a chardonnay that stands apart and aloof from all other chardonnays in Australia; its power is as formidable, and as hard to explain as, a black hole in space. It just is. Talking about its balance is far easier, for there is an inexorable logic about the way the fruit, oak and acid are so seamlessly married to each other.

James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion 2015, 98 points

Vibrant green; the power and extreme complexity of the bouquet literally leap out of the glass, yet the palate lifts the bar further, eerily like a Grand Cru White Burgundy - Chevalier Montrachet comes to mind. The mouthfeel is staggeringly deep, yet full of energy, driving the wine through to an exceptionally long finish. This will surely rival the '96 Giaconda Chardonnay.

James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion 2014, 98 points

This superb Beechworth chardonnay has mineral, struck match and yeasty mystery with a luxurious undercurrent of fruits and oak. The palate has creamy richness with superb finesse, finishing long and dry.

Ralph Kyte-Powell, The Age Epicure

A fundamentally flamboyant wine, all frills and funk, glitter and glam. Putting it near your nose is like staring into the sun. It’s so smoky. So funky. Like liquid smoke and burnt matches and fennel seeds bashed. This will cause many a drinker to pause, lest their face shatter before their partner’s eyes. The palate is a hard white body, gloves off, all talent and fury. The intensity of rolling thunder. Broad shoulders of white peach and bran and liquid smoke. Notes of twigs and chalk sparkle like talent. Fists of smoky acid. You talking to me? The winemaker’s fingers. The dance. The keyboard. The land as a stage. The toasty extremes. I don’t see anyone else here. Tonight, we drink. The zephyr of gunsmoke. An Australian chardonnay king, in full robe. War in a glass. The journey has come to this.

Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front, 96 points

The best chardonnay yet made in Australia. Profoundly complex, mineral and textured, with layers of depth and flavour, the 2010 Giaconda is perfectly balanced and should age superbly. For the Burgundy-focused, it's evocative of Coche-Dury - at its best. An essay in restrained power and balance. Scented with a complex bouquet of grapefruit, melon, lemon meringue, lime juice and yellow peach knit with smoky, matchstick-like oak, it's backed by creamy, nougat-like notes of ginger and cinnamon plus an assertive minerality. Smooth and gentle despite its dense core of citrus/melon flavour, it's sumptuous and fatty but tightens with precision and focus towards a lingering mealy, briney and savoury finish of fresh, tightly balanced acidity. Underpinned by a fine chalkiness, it's stylistically located somewhere between the 1995 and 1996 vintages, with something extra.

Jeremy Oliver, Australian Wine Annual 2013, 98 points


Wow. This is the greatest Giaconda chardonnay I can recall, showing immense power and scintillating, tight-wound complexity; it's a thrill to taste. Flinty and breathtaking minerally accents, the sulphides are as good as you'd get in most Burgundian cellars – better, in fact. Grapefruit and lime, nectarine and chalk, yellow wild flowers and plenty of grilled hazelnut in the mix; it's captivating. The palate's powerfully realised with strong stone fruit flavour and a wealth of textural layering. It drives long, and grapefruit citrus builds pithy presence; the fade is slow, really lingers. This is a landmark Giaconda, make no mistake.

Nick Stock, The Age Good Wine Guide 2013


This 2010 contends for the title of best Giaconda chardonnay yet released. It is certainly up there with the sensational 1996 and 2002 releases. Full on. Flinty. Minerally. One hundred percent compelling. An outstanding example of what Giaconda does best: rich, penetrating fruit with funky, matchsticky, smouldering fireworks. Many emulate it, almost no one pulls it off. This is a knockout. Powerful grapefruit and grilled nuts. White flowers. Nuts and toast. One for the true Giaconda chardonnay believers.

Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front, 97 points


A wine of staggering power, intensity and concentration, all the components - fruit, acidity, oak - are in perfect balance, albeit as yet tightly wound, early complexity ex a touch of matchstick. It is the first vintage made entirely in the cellar, and Kinzbrunner believes it will be better than the '96, a view I entirely agree with.

James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion 2013, 97 points


Super flinty matchstrike stuff and deep. So much going on. And in the mouth, too, but without obvious fruit exuberance. There are silky crème brûlée tastes, subtle gentle sourdough crust, and is wide as well as long. Fills all the gaps with its fruit intensity.

Tim White, The Australian Financial Review, 97 points

It’s a tremendous wine experience – from the first impression to the last. Almonds, white and yellow fruits, burnt matches and meal. There’s creaminess and toastiness, spiciness and sweetness – the flavours and textures crashing through in waves. An upper echelon Giaconda chardonnay release.

Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front, 95+ points

Sumptuous, seamless and luscious, with exceptional concentration and balance. A spicy, heady bouquet of melon, lime juice, pithy grapefruit scents, nougat and cinnamon overlies a complex spectrum of lemon candy, mineral, smoked bacon, wheatmeal and wet slate aromas. It's unctuous and creamy, with deep layers of fruit, ginger-like spice and clove and vanilla oak underpinned by a fine chalkiness, ultimately culminating in a focused, briny and mineral finish.

Jeremy Oliver, Australian Wine Annual, 96 points

This 2008 Chardonnay has incredibly intense aromas of peach blossom, golden delicious apple, pineapple, meal, struck match, ginger shortbread, fennel seed and white pepper going into some pleasantly funky aromas with some air. The medium to full-bodied palate is crisp, very tight and very concentrated with a very long finish giving some minerality. In short, this is a beautiful wine.

Lisa Perrotti-Brown, Wine Advocate # 189 June 2010

Rich colour: full buttercup yellow. The bouquet is subtle but complex: nutty, sur-lie and toasty-barrel notes, with slight char, rubber, toast and chicken-stock characters reflecting well-managed sulphides and significant oak influence. There’s a lot happening in this wine. Palate is even more impressive: it has amazing depth and concentration, density, fleshiness and weight, without sacrificing finesse or subtlety. Powerful and long, it keeps giving more, with incredible depth and a seemingly endless finish.

Huon Hooke, http://huonhooke.com

Quite extraordinary, and just beginning to reveal what it will ultimately deliver. Exotically spiced, with heady, deeply layered scents of dark berries, musky spices and black pepper backed by nuances of smoked meats, fine-grained new chocolatey oak, it’s lifted by alluring floral notes and suggestions of underbrush. Still very closed and youthfully introverted, it’s beginning to reveal an excellent length of dark, plush, briary fruit knit tightly around sweet new fine-grained oak and fine, powder-dry tannins, finishing with astonishing savoury balance and structure.

Jeremy Oliver, Australian Wine Annual 2015, 98 points

Tasted immediately after the wine was bottled; if it was suffering from bottle shock, it will be a celestial wine. It has a highly fragrant bouquet with spice and red fruits to the fore, the silky palate taking those flavours onto another plane, expanding their range to the point where the gossamer tannins are needed to provide an outer framework; red cherry, black cherry, sour cherry and briefly poached and spiced plum flavours chase each other around the palate, in doing so increasing its length as the chase becomes more frantic. There is so much to be discovered in the depths of this lovely wine.

James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion 2013, 97 points

Arrestingly complex and savoury, this stylish, smoky shiraz unfolds a dusty, faintly minty perfume of heady floral notes, sweet small black and red berries, tight-knit smoky oak, herbal bay leaf nuances and a hint of charcuterie. It’s long, pliant and fine-grained, with a pleasing core of fresh, juicy and tightly focused flavours of small sour-edged blackcurrant, blackberry and dark plums tightly knit with cedary oak and dusty tannins, finishing long and savoury.

Jeremy Oliver, Australian Wine Annual, 96 points

The difference between this and the Estate Vineyard Shiraz cannot be overemphasised; here, there is deeper colour, and an almost shocking display on the bouquet and palate of heavily spiced black fruits, anise, earth and briar, a touch of bitter chocolate appearing on the finish and aftertaste; the oak, too, plays a larger role in this wine. If you manage to get your hands on a bottle of each, try to decide how much the difference is the hand of god, how much the hand of man.

James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion 2013, 96 points

This was one of the most wondrous reds I’ve ever stuck in my gob. Giaconda, Warner, Beechworth: simple words that might resonate through time. When smells, tastes and words interleave, names do mean something. Pure raspberries and blackberries, gentle pepper and other transitory souk spices. A palate bursting with fruit, relieved by the finest, building, black coal-edged tannins. Long, so long.

Tim White, The Australian Financial Review 30 May 2014

Deep garnet-purple in color. the 2010 Warner Vineyard Shiraz presents a wonderfully fragrant and complex nose of warm blackberries, wild blueberries and black raspberries with hints of pepper, dried Provencal herbs, cloves, aniseed, char-grilled meat and loam. Medium-bodied, the palate is both elegantly constructed and intense. with loads of black and red fruit flavor layers and a pleasant earthy and herbal streak. It is all framed by medium to firm rounded tannins as well as crisp acid and finishes with great persistence.

Lisa Perrotti-Brown, eRobertParker, 94 points

2008 Reflective of a warmer, riper season, this brooding shiraz is going to need plenty of time. Its peppery, spicy bouquet of deep red and black fruits, dark chocolate and gamey, cedary oak reveals hints of musk, blueberries and briar. Backed by powerful, fine-grained savoury oak, it’s medium to full-bodied but densely packed with fruit and textural elements. Long and firm, still rather closed, it slowly reveals the extent of its length and depth, finishing meaty and savoury, but with a profound, lingering core of black and red fruits still tightly wound around its fine, grainy tannins. 

Jeremy Oliver, The Australian Wine Annual

Deliciously spicy, mid-weight Shiraz with excellent poise and balance. It has some fine floral nuance that mixes it up with Satsuma plum fruit. It is elegant with a hint of something savoury and earthy on the finish.

Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate, 94 points

Artfully balanced and focused, this exceptional pinot reveals a deeply floral and earthy bouquet whose heady perfume of dark cherries, plums and charcuterie meat undertones reveals cranberry-like nuances. It’s long and elegant, with a fine, bony undercarriage of firmish tannins and some very smart new fine-grained oak beneath its briary and finely integrated flavours of plums, cherries and berries. It culminates in a drying, slatey and savoury finish of exceptional persistence and tightly knit acidity.

Jeremy Oliver, Australian Wine Annual 2015, 95 points

Heady and perfumed, deeply and profoundly floral, with scents of red rose petals, violets, sweet black berries and fine cedary oak backed by nuances of blueberries, dark plums and undertones of cloves and dried herbs. It’s long, fine-grained and supremely elegant, with mouthfilling, translucently clear flavour extending with suppleness and balance over a sandpapery backbone of drying tannins. It finishes with clarity and focus, with a lingering core of fruit and meaty complexity. 

Jeremy Oliver, Australian Wine Annual 2015, 95 points

Trust Rick Kinzbrunner: take a rain-soaked vintage like ’11, a variety like nebbiolo, and give it close on 3 years in barrel, but he still achieves the near-impossible. The bouquet has all the violets and rose petals it is supposed to have, moving with deceptive ease into the sombre opening stanza of the palate before it, too, lifts with mouthwatering red and black cherry fruits, the tannins like the cellos in a symphony orchestra, insistent and underscoring the moment they are called upon to take command.

James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion 2015, 97 points

The palate is full of energy and life, brimming with perfectly ripe red cherry fruits, some slightly darker nuances too, really supple tannins stretching long through the finish with a gently grainy texture.

Nick Stock, The Age Good Wine Guide 2013

Possessing a medium ruby colour, the rose petal character on the nose is pretty profound, with quite a lot of tar and some funky game notes. Layers of aromas include rose hip tea, tobacco, some loam, a bit of dark chocolate and a touch of anise amongst the stewed Ceylon tea leaves. The medium to full body, crisp acidity and firm, chewy tannins confirm this is a wonderfully varietally expressive wine with a long complex finish. (barrel sample)

Lisa Perrotti-Brown, The Wine Advocate June 2010, 95-97 points

The last one and what a swansong it is. All the hallmarks of great Cabernet are here, dark berries, cherries, chocolate and various leaves, the oak slides in perfectly with sweet vanillin and baking spices and there's an edge of brooding dark stones, this smells complex and suave with violet-like florals too. The palate is deeply structured and has a  beautifully ripe layer of fine tannin that carries dark cherry and plum fruit  flavour long and fresh. The balance is perfect and the depth is striking.  Finishes juicy and vivacious but with an air of grace. Impeccable. RIP.  Missing you already.

Nick Stock, JamesSuckling.com 

Deep, dark colour; a wine that takes no time in making it clear any discussion will take place on my terms, not yours. It is austere and patrician, in step with the deep cellar in which the barrels were matured, and has a display of acidity that (in red wines) you more normally encounter in conjunction with under-ripe fruit. That is not the case here - the grapes have been perfectly ripened and given support by quality oak.

James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion 2015, 94 points

Plenty of pepper and snapped twigs on the nose, some autumnal smoky leaves, but also classy cedar/vanilla oak and blackcurrant with a little perfume. Medium bodied, mild astringency here and somewhat tart acidity, though a core of bright, almost juicy, redcurrant flavour carries the wine through the mouth pretty well. Decent finish.

Gary Walsh, The Wine Front, 89 points

Medium to long-term cabernet, with an earthy, slightly meaty and baked bouquet of light berry aromas and cedary oak, lacking genuine freshness and perfume. Smooth, polished and elegant, with deep flavours of dark berries and plums underpinned by a smoky, briary aspect and tightly knit with fine-grained newish oak and supple, creamy tannins, it finishes faintly mineral, with nuances of mint, menthol and dried herbs.

Jeremy Oliver, The Australian Wine Annual