Winemaker Notes

The first harvest, bouncing back from the devastating fires of Black Saturday in 2009… this was an an exciting, emotional and liberating day; a sense of renewal intertwined with sentimentality and pride. Fruit across the property was scarce and precious. With the tantalising prospect of what nuance and idiosyncrasy we would explore across the various parts of this small, charming vineyard in the future, 2012 was all about gathering the absolute best of what we had there and then – individually selecting only the perfect bunches across all corners of the property, north, east south and west. The agonisingly scrupulous yet deeply joyful experience (peppered with spicy moments of tension and stress!) yielded a magnificent 1.4T of perfect Pinot Noir.

I recall my first thought in the winery: “This fruit is precious, don’t up”, was closely followed by the clarity of what needed to be done. I wanted to simply remove all stems to leave one small fermenter of perfect, whole Nine One Six Pinot Noir berries. Nothing else was removed, and nothing was added. This was the first Nine One Six vintage, and the sole vision was to explore the character, and to an extent the potential, of the fruit and the vineyard. In order to do this, winemaking had to be pure and low-intervention, yet with guidance enough to coax the absolute best out of all elements – colour, aroma, flavour, structure and texture.

After three days of resting peacefully, fermentation began naturally, and continued cleanly until it’s completion two and a half weeks later. There’s nothing like drinking in the aromas of a ferment from a new vineyard for the first time. It is such an exciting sensation for a winemaker. There were the familiar varietal cues of fragrant Pinot Noir, with wafts of more unique characters – even at this early stage of “juice becoming wine” there were scents of bergamot, spiced strawberry, peppermint and potpourri.

The moderate temperatures during ferment, and the gentle hand-plunging had extracted only the silkiest of tannin but I wanted to explore a little more texture at this point… build further complexity and integrity in to the structure. I was also conscious of the importance of cellaring-potential with these wines. I can say now, entering in to 2017 and with four vintages of Nine One Six Pinot Noir to draw upon, that these wines need time – hence releasing the debut Nine One Six Pinot Noir four years after the vintage.

Nine One Six Pinot Noir to me feels like a storybook, even though it has just begun, and will tell a compelling narrative over time. The vineyard character seems to “concentrate” with time, growing more and more expressive. The wines tend to become deeper, more complex, more evocative… more thought provoking. Great wine should do this in my view. The new knowledge informs and inspires future vintages, and on it goes.