2015 vintage off to a strong start in Australia’s Beechworth
Inside Giaconda's granite cave
I've just returned from a few days in Beechworth, a jewel in the northeast of Victoria, roughly 3 hours drive from Melbourne. It's a wine region made famous by Rick Kinzbrunner's Giaconda project, more recently by Julian Castagna and more recently still by Adrian Rodda, winner of the head-turning 2015 Australian Young Gun of Wine award.
Originally it was gold that brought people here in the 19th century, and locals recount with pride the history that came with the gold rush. Australia's most famous bushranger Ned Kelly used to roam the surrounding area and drink in the town’s various pubs when he wasn’t raising hell.
The town still looks and feels like an old gold rush town. The architecture has a sense of grandeur and style about it, and the streets were built wide and swanky. I imagine you'd have been able to purchase all manner of life's little luxuries in Beechworth back in the 1800’s and not much has changed in that regard today. Rocco and Lisa Esposito have established a brisk trade in quality coffee and salumi at their stylish Project 49 shop after moving up form Melbourne. It's bustling with locals and visitors from the moment it opens to the moment it closes. Next door at Tanswell's Commercial Hotel (which opened in 1853), there's a rocking front bar featuring local beers, wines and bands. And to eat, husband and wife team Michael Ryan and Jeanette Henderson opened their much-awarded restaurant Provenance in Beechworth in 2009, one of Australia’s finest and authentically regional restaurants. Make sure you book a meal here if you’re in the area.
Where wine is concerned, Beechworth does fuller-bodied whites extremely well (chardonnay and roussanne in particular), and reds are lead by shiraz, sangiovese (very strong), tempranillo and nebbiolo (although it is still early days for the latter). There’s an inherent sense of power across all styles, and the best wines deliver power with complexity, balance, and freshness. It’s no easy task given the climate here runs from very cold winters to extremely warm summers. Viticulturally there’s much that can still be improved in many established vineyards.
Beechworth soil profile
As an overview of the tasting, the 2015 vintage is a very strong one for Beechworth, though some of the top producers have yet to bottle. I tasted 2015’s from barrel, tank, and ceramic egg at Castagna and Giaconda and the wines were above average quality across the board. Castagna has some real firepower in the various components of 2015 sangiovese I tasted from barrel.
I tasted a number of the parcels of Giaconda’s 2015 Estate Vineyard Chardonnay from barrel in the new underground granite cellar. It's a powerful vintage for Giaconda’s flagship white, a wine of real complexity, presence, persistence, and weight and certainly one of the great vintages of this wine in the making.
Parcels of the 2015 Giaconda Estate Vineyard Shiraz from barrel were similarly excellent, offering a very stony, savoury and graphite-dusted expression of granite-grown shiraz with plenty of black cherry, blackberry and strong notes of dark chocolate. It’s a complex and deeply engaging wine that will also undoubtedly be one of their finest wines when released.
Alongside the more established pillars of quality there’s a talented and dedicated generation making modern and astutely evolved wines, people like Adrian Rodda (A Rodda & Fighting Gully Road), Gary Mills (Jamsheed, Project 49, Warner Vineyard) and Tessa Brown (Vignerons Schmolzer & Brown) to name a pair of bright lights that have more recently moved to the region full time. The terroir and the climate are strong forces, and the wines I tasted make for a bold statement of quality and also consistency across the group. The region has certainly entered a new phase, attracting intelligent and talented winemakers, and I’m tipping more will follow. Exciting times are on the horizon.
—Nick Stock, Contributing Editor
