2024 Jean-Paul Trijsburg ‘Skinzy’ Viognier Heathcote
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.

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Viognier holds a special place in the world of grape varieties. It’s both the basis of some of the France’s most celebrated white wines (Condrieu and the tiny monopole of Château-Grillet) and an example of a variety brought back from the brink of extinction. Australia played a significant role in the variety’s resurgence, with a trend for both co-fermented reds and varietal whites taking hold here in the early 2000s. While there’s a lot less demand for 100% viognier wines these days – with their oily richness, lower levels of acidity, and flamboyant aromatics of honeysuckle and apricot, Viognier-based whites can be something of an acquired taste – this version from Ballarat-based Dutch winemaker Jean-Paul Trijsburg shows what the variety can do when given the orange wine treatment (eight days on skins, bottled unfiltered).

Tasting note

As you might expect from viognier, this is a powerfully aromatic wine, but one that (mercifully) steers away from the honeysuckle and acacia floral notes the variety can sometimes exhibit. Trijsburg’s rendition instead exudes a full orchard of autumnal fruit: jammy, almost overripe apricots, sappy quince, and beurre bosc pear mingle here with a hint of candied ginger and nasturtium blossom. Trijsburg also smartly avoids the common viognier pitfall of an oily, viscous texture, with enough bright acidity here to keep the wine aloft as it moves across the palate. The finish is delightfully savoury and saline, with a parmesan-like lees character framed by strong minerality, and a little tickle of phenolic grip from the skin contact. Overall, it’s a compellingly different take on a challenging variety.

Themes of this wine

Viognier

A highly aromatic grape, viognier is very distinctly scented with apricot, which can vary from the flesh, to the kernel, to apricot blossom, and those characters can be extremely exotic when quite ripe. It is also a grape that is quite phenolic but with low acidity. So, ripe examples will tend to be luscious and rich with high alcohol. Picked earlier and the apricot notes are more delicate, with acidity more of a feature. New oak flavours are not uncommon with more serious examples. In France’s Northern Rhône the variety is traditionally grown as an accessory variety alongside syrah, and co-fermented with it, in order to boost the finished wine’s colour and aromatics – a neat trick that Australian winemakers have since emulated.

Skin contact

The skins of grapes 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 just a little bit to get its blush, and red wine plenty to get the colour and structure. Skin-contact whites … well, they have some skin contact. Yep. This means more colour, more tannin, more structure, and a different flavour profile.

Unfiltered wine

In winemaking there are many types of filters, from quite simple methods to exceedingly complicated machines, but they all essentially do the same thing. The idea is to remove matter from the wine before bottling, taking out any tiny solids as well as yeasts and some other microbial elements. Depending on the type of filter employed, you can lose a bit of flavour and texture doing this, which is why many producers champion their wines as being unfiltered. Cloudy, unfiltered wines bottled with their sediments tend to exhibit more savoury characteristics from the presence of the lees. A fun experiment you can run if you have a bottle of cloudy wine is to let the solids settle, open the bottle gently to minimise disruption, and taste the relatively clear top fraction – then give the bottle a little shake and taste the wine with its solids. You may be surprised by the difference. (Don’t attempt this with sparkling wine!)

Heathcote

Heathcote is rugged country, a tinder-dry landscape of rusty iron-rich soils littered with sculpturally stacked granitic boulders. It’s mythical territory, ancient land, and home to some of the world’s oldest viticultural soils. But as a wine region, it is a relatively young one, which saw an explosion of growth in the 90s. Shiraz led the charge, and it became Victoria’s answer to the Barossa or McLaren Vale, producing wines of significant power. But Heathcote is very different to both those places, and it is not that easily defined. Today, shiraz finds myriad expressions, and other varieties are taking a firm grip.