Alex Croker

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  • Alex Croker

    Alex Croker makes wines under two labels that tell two sides of the same story. Little Brunswick Wine Co. is the experimental arm – born in a Brunswick sharehouse in 2017, built to play, and populated with alternative varieties, unconventional blends, and a wine community spirit that Croker has always worn openly. Alexander Direen, released from 2022, is something else: a more considered, personal statement, its name taken from his soon-to-be married name and anchored to the Heathcote shiraz country he grew up in. Between them, the two labels span a restrained but adventurous corner of the Victorian wine landscape – Central Victorian in soul, untraditional in detail, and unapologetically built to be shared and returned to.

  • 2020 ECK Wines ‘The Matilda’ Reserve Shiraz

    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.

  • 2024 Jean-Paul Trijsburg ‘Skinzy’ Viognier

    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.

  • Jarrod Kiven

    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.

  • 2022 Chalmers Falanghina

    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

    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

    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.

  • Tim Flynn, Darcy Muller, Alex Servinis & Ed Curnow

    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.

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Tim Flynn, Darcy Muller, Alex Servinis & Ed Curnow

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