Description
WINNER: Best New Winery of the Year – 2022 Halliday Wine Companion
“Place of Changing Winds – the place and the vineyard – may well be the most exciting ‘new’ development in Australian wine. It will jump straight on to elite lists of Australian wine producers. You could describe this endeavour in one word: uncompromised.” Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front
Place of Changing Winds is the vineyard project of Bibendum’s founder and owner Robert Walters. It is a single site in the Macedon Ranges of Victoria where Walters and his team began planting in 2012. The POCW site is very close to Bindi and lies on the same geological belt with a proven track record for quality Pinot and Chardonnay. The vineyard is in a little hamlet called Bullengarook, between Mount Bullengarook and Mount Macedon, about one-hour north-west of Melbourne.
To understand how to establish and manage this kind of vineyard took a lot of research and has been the result of some 25 years of engagement with the best European growers. By the time the project was established, Rob, with his viticulturist and friend Tim Brown had visited Europe together five times, in order to meet with many of the most inspirational growers Rob knows, and finalising the planning of the vineyard.
Place of Changing Winds is a super-high density, organic certified, no-compromise vineyard, focused exclusively on producing the highest quality wines with the maximum expression of their quartz and sandstone riddled soils.
The vineyard lies in an area that was called Warekilla by the original inhabitants, the Wurundjeri people. In their language, Warekilla meant “Place of Changing Winds” – a characteristic of the site that still holds true today.
In addition to the vines they grow themselves, they also produce some Syrah and Marsanne from vines further north of their base, in the warmer and dryer climates of Heathcote, and, from 2021, Mount Alexander in Harcourt North. Both these sites are superb places to grow Rhone varietals, and in both cases they work very closely with the vineyard owner, who works to their organic specifications -they choose the harvest dates and all picking is done by hand.
The soils here are the famous ‘Cambrian soils’—red dirt made up of eroded basalt over limestone, shot through with greenstone and jasper. The wines were grown organically, without any chemical inputs, and with minimal irrigation.
About this wine: This comes from the same vineyard as the Harcourt Syrah. As always, the grapes were picked flavour ripe, pressed gently and sent straight to barrel (500- and 228-litre) and 220-litre Wineglobe for fermentation and aging. Malolactic conversion happened naturally. After 12 months in cask and Wineglobe, the wine was racked to tank for an additional eight months’ maturation before being bottled at the end of November 2023. It has the power and richness of previous releases, yet with good vibrancy thanks to Harcourt’s soils, the cooler year and the inclusion of good levels of Roussanne in the blend. It will certainly age, gaining more honeyed characters, but it’s delicious now.
95 points, Jane Faulkner, Halliday’s Australian Wine Companion “As you’d expect from a blend of marsanne/roussanne, it’s full of honeysuckle, pear skin phenolics and gorgeous texture, with white stone fruit, blanched almonds, ginger powder and oak spices. It’s a little smoky, toasty with nutty lees, and everything is contained by a savoury overlay. Full bodied, luscious without being weighty. It’s rather moreish – you’ll keep coming back to it.”
94 points, Mike Bennie, The Wine Front “This is such a wonderful wine its success is in its concentration of flavour and texture (fleshy and chalky at the same time), its vivid sense of hallmarks of the variety (bitter lemon, preserved lemon, herbal detail, minerality) And a general sense of energy. It sits at medium weight. Its stains the palette gently, its perfume is inviting and ultra-pleasing, that it drinks with such ease belies its complexity. Wickedly enjoyable.”
RRP $68 Our Special Price $55.99 when you buy 6 or more of this wine
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