2024 Good Intentions ‘Magnolia’ Wrattonbully

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In the hands of winemaker Andrew Burchell, the highly aromatic gewürztraminer has been tamed through a thrilling and deeply hued skin contact white. Tangy fruit and spice meet a complex profile of nuts, caramel and savoury notes.

Producer
Good Intentions
Region

Wrattonbully
RRP

$35
Vintage

2024
Variety/Varieties

Gewürztraminer
Alc./Vol.

13.7%

Amber-copper coloured, with hypnotic aromas of tangy fruit, exotic spices and Turkish delight. It tastes of orange marmalade, with some walnuts and a little bitterness like orange peel, and a dry, tea-like finish that lingers.

Andrew Burchell has made at Good Intentions Wine Co. Burchell has built a reputation as one of the Limestone Coast’s most exciting emerging producers, farming the vines himself and working with a minimal, old-world hand. This gewürztraminer is a genuine reinterpretation of the variety: tamed, textured and thrillingly deepened by skin contact.

Gewürztraminer is one of the most instantly recognisable grapes in the wine world, and one of the most divisive. Its name gives it away – “gewürz” means spice in German – and in the glass it delivers exactly that: a heady rush of lychee, rose petal, Turkish delight and warm spice, usually paired with a plush, oily texture and a low-acid, off-dry sweetness that’s made it a love-it-or-leave-it proposition for decades. Done conventionally, it can tip into blowsy, perfumed excess. Done with restraint, it’s one of the most hedonistic aromatic whites you can pour.

Skin contact winemaking – leaving white grape skins in contact with the juice during fermentation, the way red wine is made – has quietly reshaped Australian white wine over the past decade and a half. What started as a fringe, natural-wine curiosity has become one of the most interesting technical conversations in the country, as winemakers use skin contact to bring texture, grip and savoury complexity to grapes that might otherwise lean simple or one-dimensional. Tannin, colour and a certain wild, unpolished energy are the trade-off for the bright, clean fruit of conventional whites — and for the right grape, in the right hands, it’s a trade worth making.

Few grapes reward that trade like gewürztraminer. Skin contact takes all that natural perfume and sweetness and gives it a spine — fine, tea-like tannins reining in the aromatics, oxidative “rancio” characters adding a savoury, almost sherry-like edge, and the sweetness recast as texture rather than sugar.

Tasting note

Deep amber-copper in the glass, glowing like evening light through a stained-glass window. The nose is a Turkish sweet shop in full swing – rosewater, jasmine and Turkish delight tangle with cut mango, orange blossom and a whisper of clove. Cognac-like warmth and dried apricot add an old-world, almost Madeira-edged complexity, while the palate turns savoury with orange bitters, bergamot tea and pomegranate. Fine, black-tea tannins give it grip and length, finishing long, spiced and utterly moreish.

When to drink it

If you were at a wine bar, you’d be ordering this faster than you can say ‘charcuterie,’ and enjoy it alongside the croquettes and all sorts of toasted snacks. Or maybe it’s BYO to your favourite yum cha, where you slurp it alongside servings of dumplings and that smoked duck bao bun you’ve just eyed on the menu. Or maybe it’s at the beach: seagulls overhead and sand between your toes while you reach for the esky to sneak another dose of this liquid bliss. You’re feeling charitable so there might even be some left when your mates get back from their kiosk-run with the Chiko Roll you were promised. Jeez, how good’s summer?

Themes of this wine

Skin contact

The skins hold the colouring matter and lots of tannin. Leave them in contact with the juice/wine and you’ll extract those elements. Most conventional white wine sees no skin contact, rosé a little bit to get a blush, and red wine plenty to get the colour and structure. Skin-contact whites… well, they have some skin contact. Yep. More colour, more tannin and a different flavour profile.

Gewürztraminer

Gewürztraminer is a pungently aromatic grape, scented with lychees, rose petals and musky bath salts. It’s a variety that has long been thought of as ‘nanna’ wine, perfumed and often sweet, but the best expressions from Alsace are some of the world’s greatest wines, and cutting-edge makers in this country are fine-tuning it into exciting new expressions, both solo and as a part of blends.

Explore Further

Deep Dive

Australia’s Best Skin Contact Whites

What does a ‘skin-contact white wine’ mean in Australia in 2025? It’s certainly a much tougher question to answer now than it was when we first took a Deep Dive into the topic back in 2019. Following in the wake of a handful of trailblazing definers of the genre, a much more diverse array of winemakers – at all points on the spectrum from ‘natural’ to ‘conventional’ – are now macerating some or all of their white grapes on skins during fermentation. The resulting wines are as diverse as their makers: some so deeply coloured they could be mistaken for light reds, and others so light-on they could slip into the white by the glass section of your local bistro’s list. With such a huge palette of colour and flavour for makers to play with, we thought it was time to revisit the subject and do another Deep Dive.

2024 Good Intentions ‘Magnolia’ Wrattonbully

Amber-copper coloured, with hypnotic aromas of tangy fruit, exotic spices and Turkish delight. It tastes of orange marmalade, with some walnuts and a little bitterness like orange peel, and a dry, tea-like finish that lingers.

Tasting note

When to drink it

Themes of this wine

Skin contact

Gewürztraminer

Explore Further

Deep Dive

Australia’s Best Skin Contact Whites

Wine 101

Gewürztraminer

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