2015 Airlie Bank Noir: bizarre, intriguing and lovely

The wine in my glass — a 2015 Airlie Bank Noir — should be disgusting, but it’s not. It’s unusual, but delicious.

When winemaker Tim Shand joined Airlie Bank he decided to experiment.

The wine in my glass should be disgusting. It was made from vines struggling with an infestation of the microscopic phylloxera louse. It was fermented using Brettanomyces, a strain of yeast almost universally despised by winemakers for its tendency to produce tough, barnyardy flavours. And it’s riddled with smoke taint.

But it’s not disgusting. It’s delicious. Unusual — but lovely. It’s the 2015 Airlie Bank Noir, a pinot from the Yarra Valley, and it’s one of the most bizarre and intriguing wines I’ve tasted for a long time.

Airlie Bank is the second label of Punt Road, one of the Yarra’s leading wineries, also home to Napoleone brewers and cider makers. When winemaker Tim Shand joined the business a couple of years ago he decided to revitalise the Airlie Bank brand by making it the outlet for small-batch experimentation in the winery — while keeping the price of each wine around $20-$22.

“I felt it was patronising to think that people who ‘only’ spend $20 on a bottle of wine don’t also want something interesting and challenging,” he says.

The approach has paid off. Over the last few months I’ve been increasingly excited by the 2015 vintage Airlie Bank wines I’ve tasted: a crisp, fragrant rosé made from pinot noir and pinot gris; a fabulously vibrant, dangerously slurpable red called Franc, made from the underappreciated cabernet franc grape; a wonderfully rich but balanced and fresh skins-fermented chardonnay called Blanc II.

The Noir, though, the wine that shouldn’t taste good but does: that takes Airlie Bank to a whole new level.

Just before vintage, Shand and his winemaking team were discussing the problems Yarra Valley vignerons face: phylloxera, the debilitating vine louse first discovered in the region in 2006 and now munching its way through many vineyards; the “rogue” yeast Brettanomyces; and smoke taint from bushfires, a recurring problem in the area.

“We asked ourselves: what if we made a wine that represented arguably these three most significant threats?” he says.

So they picked some pinot from stressed vines heavily infested with phylloxera, fermented half of the fruit with a pure strain of Brettanomyces, and hot-smoked some of the bunches in an old rubbish bin over smouldering oak chips before fermentation.

The result? A darker than normal pinot with surprisingly succulent and intense — albeit atypical — fruit flavours, a gutsy earthiness, and a discernible but pleasant smoky aftertaste.

I took the bottle out to dinner at a restaurant with normal people — not wine geeks. I didn’t give them the background, just let them pour it and try themselves. It was fascinating to see their reactions.

“Whisky!” said one, after taking her first sip. Here we go, I thought. The next comment will be negative. After all, wine nerds know that pinot should never taste like whisky.

“It’s ... smoky. Weird. But I really like it!”

And we all went back to enjoying the wine.

The Airlie Bank Blanc II and Noir wines are available through blackheartsandsparrows.com.au in Melbourne and princewinestore.com.au in Sydney. Other Airlie Bank wines — including that gorgeous cabernet franc — have wider distribution.