What happens when you take a talented young winemaker and get them to tackle the very traditional place/variety combination of Heathcote shiraz? You get something like this – a joyously rich, dark-fruited and gently spicy shiraz that cleverly talks to Australian winemaking tradition while blazing its own trail.
What happens when you take a talented young winemaker and get them to tackle the very traditional place/variety combination of Heathcote shiraz? You get something like this – a joyously rich, dark-fruited and gently spicy shiraz that cleverly talks to Australian winemaking tradition while blazing its own trail.
Viognier can cop a bad rap amongst wine lovers for its heady aromatics, unctuous texture and lack of acidity. But this rendition made from Heathcote fruit shows what the variety is capable of doing when goosed up with a little bit of skin contact and lees.
It’s a long way from the high-rises of Wall Street to an urban winery in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, especially if you take a detour via Provence. This is the journey that financier-turned-winemaker Jarrod Kiven has undertaken, launching his eponymous label in 2022 with a just two wines – a Pyrenees syrah and Beechworth viognier. Since then he’s kept the label small-scale, resisting the temptation to expand the range in favour of keeping production strictly hands-on. Kiven produces a compact collection of wines – just two wines per annual release thus far – from cool-climate vineyards, using traditional methods to craft wines of serious intent.
Falanghina has found a special place in the Chalmer’s family’s Heathcote vineyard, showing a new face to the southern Italian grape, revealing an exotically aromatic wine of intensity, drive and freshness.
Emily Kinsman’s ECK Wines is based out of her small vineyard and winery in central Heathcote, where she organically farms less than half a hectare of shiraz. That modest holding is supported by fruit – shiraz, chardonnay, pinot noir, marsanne, cabernet and riesling – sourced from across Heathcote and Mount Alexander, in the Bendigo region, with a greenfield site in Macedon recently purchased, which will soon be planted to vines. Originally a lawyer by trade, the pull of making something with her hands and a simpler, more connected life captivated Kinsman, and her wines follow that attraction, with a traditional approach, incorporating old, larger format oak and amphora, along with low sulphur additions and no fining or filtration.
Kirilly Gordon’s career has taken her from her Macedon home to wineries around Victoria and to Italy and France. As of 2021, she has looped back home, working at the vineyard the inspired her in the first place, Bindi. That role works in concert with her own label, Bowerbird Wines, specialising in shiraz and viognier, while Patch Wines is her most recent venture, a partnership to make fun, accessible wines that sprang out of the wreckage of Covid.
Pool Wines is a collaborative effort from a quartet of childhood friends who turned a fun hobby into a serious endeavour, making lo-fi, sulphur-free wine from their simple winery in Kyneton. Sourcing fruit locally, the emphasis is placed on the traditional varieties grown in Heathcote – shiraz and cabernet – and surrounds, but the fruit is picked earlier, and new oak is never used, while vermentino and moscato giallo from Chalmers gets the skins treatment.
A textural, flavour-intense but light-footed wine, this is loaded with orchard fruits, smoky minerals and waxy notes.
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