Giaconda Winery
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For a long time, Australia was primarily famous for its Shiraz and Cabernets. It was hardly thought possible that someone there could produce some of the world's best Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs from scratch. Until Rick Kinzbrunner founded his Giaconda winery in Beechworth.
Rick was originally a mechanical engineer and became interested in wine in the early 1970s. However, his interest became so intense that he studied oenology at UC Davis in California and was hired by some of the best wineries in Napa and Sonoma. These included Stag's Leap, Simi and Matanzas Creek. He later moved to France and worked for several years for Moueix in Bordeaux, which today also distributes his wines in Europe. After returning home in 1980, he took a job as an assistant winemaker at Brown Brothers in Milawa, but at the same time bought land in a previously unknown area of Victoria. The name: Beechworth, located at the foot of the North-East Victorian Alps. The terroir seemed ideal to him. The soils are characterised by ancient granite loam over decomposed gravel and clay, and he planted the vineyards in 1982 at an altitude of around 400 metres. The annual rainfall is around 800 mm. The nights are generally cool, the days relatively warm, which provides ideal conditions for slow ripening.
Even today, despite the enormous demand, the total area of the vineyard does not exceed 4 hectares. They are planted with Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Shiraz (directly at the winery), as well as Roussanne and Nebbiolo a few kilometres away. The vineyard has been certified organic and cultivated according to Demeter standards since 2018. The perfectly ripened grapes are always fermented spontaneously, the wines are matured in French wood, never filtered and only minimally sulphurised. The wines are never pumped over during production because everything is based on gravity. For Chardonnay, whole grapes are pressed in a basket press and the wine is fermented in wood and matured on the full lees, whereby the proportion of new wood does not exceed 30%. With the red varieties, sometimes more, sometimes less whole grapes are also fermented. This fermentation takes place in terracotta amphorae before the mash is pressed in basket presses and the wine is matured in wood.
The wines from Giaconda have an excellent reputation worldwide. The Chardonnays in particular are among the best that the grape variety has to offer. And so the 2021 vintage has reached 100 points with Robert Parker for the first time.
© Images: Giaconda Winery
