The Wine Farm Gippsland, Victoria
What happens when you put two wine tragics from opposite sides of the world together and they have a chance meeting in the home country of one? They fall in love, get married, start a family and pool everything they have and finally purchase a vineyard. For Anna and Neil Hawkins it had to be a cool climate site for sure and being 50km’s from the southern-most point of mainland Australia they’d found the perfect vineyard in Gippsland. It’s time to let some of these exciting wines out into the market. Here is a list of the new releases.
PINOT GRIS
I’d never made a Pinot gris before taking carriage of a thousand vines of it as part of our impassioned leap onto The Wine Farm. I had a clean slate.
PG can be a bit of a Plain Jane variety so I contemplated fermenting some or all of the beautiful pink berries on their skins to try and give it a little more texture and guts. But the closer I came to picking the more I leant towards a traditional whole bunch press. Why? The acidity in the grapes was just awesome and not something I was prepared to sacrifice. (Potassium released from the skins during fermentation bonds to the tartaric acid, rendering it useless.)
So I picked the grapes just as the acid became ripe (including over 150 vines of Chardonnay that were planted unknowingly among the PG – hence ‘field blend’), chilled them down, cold whole-bunch pressed them off their skins the next day and let nature take its course.
Having seen only stainless steel and racked just once to its bottling tank, the wine has a spritely palate that is fresh and moreish – none of that oiliness PG often delivers when the picking date has been missed by a week or three. Crunchy pears rather than soft yellow mushy ones and a nose that’s alive with all things citrus. A gentle spiced nuttiness adds texture and intrigue.
Drink it a little warmer than you’d normally drink a white to really give the flavours time to shine.
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