The 2022 growing season started out with substantial winter and spring rains due to La Nina but dried out around Christmas and into the new year. A warm January and February led to a very consistent and well-paced ripening period. The Gamay crop was made up of small yields due to being a young vineyard, and was picked on the 7th April with small bunches of good concentration and intensity.
Handpicked fruit was wild fermented initially utilising 100% whole bunch carbonic maceration, then destemmed and pressed to a single use barrique to finish fermentation. The wine was left undisturbed for 10 months prior to bottling.
93 points. Inaugural release of a gamay from Bannockburn. It was grown on vines that were planted in 2014, they were only grafted over to gamay in 2019. It was fermented, wild, with 100% whole bunches (cab mac) and then, while still fermenting, was destemmed and pressed to one-year-old oak. This is a gorgeous wine to drink. It’s especially gorgeous if you don’t mind some reductive characters, which are overt at first though they gradually blow off, or largely so. It’s spicy, floral, exuberant in its strawberry-cherry flavours, blessed with garden herb/earth/woodsmoke characters – it’s wildly complex – but all the while it stays true to the main mission, which is to be a light red of immesh drinkability. This is a winner. Campbell Mattinson, winefront.com.au.
