From the trickiest of locations come pinots of sheer excellence
The wines that will follow are almost too exciting to contemplate.
There’s no other vineyard quite like Bastard Hill. There’s its physical nature for a start: 13ha at 380m above sea level, carved out of the rainforest at Gladysdale in the Upper Yarra. Two perilous slopes fall away from a central high ridge, at a gradient that would make mountain goats think twice. No other place on Earth with the capacity to produce chardonnay and pinot noir of aching beauty is so pockmarked by wombat holes. It acquired its name from the vineyard workers planting it out. They would dread seeing the day’s schedule requiring them to cling to the place’s steepest slope: “Not that Bastard Hill again.”
Ray Guerin was sent from McLaren Vale by the original investors to bring the Bastard to life. He was there 26 years, raised a family on that hill, and established a career that has him universally acknowledged as the most significant viticultural figure in Australian wine’s push into cool-climate margins. When he planted a vineyard with his own money, he did it somewhere more reliable, just down the hill where the tightrope got a fraction wider.
“You just can’t make a vineyard like Bastard Hill work purely as a grower,” he says. “It’s just so marginal.” That’s why it’s a whispered myth, a vineyard with a reputation born of ambitious dreams and fantasised potential, rather than runs on the board. Original investors sold to Hardys and while the wines that came out in the 1990s are still discussed with reverence, the difficulty of working the Bastard became too much for a company rolling through private equity ownership. It went on the market in 2022 and fell into ideal hands.
Giant Steps, part of Jackson Family Wines’ global holdings, has already done a power of work to bring the Bastard back to life. The first wines under their stewardship are spectacular. The wines that will follow them are almost too exciting to contemplate.
GIANT STEPS BASTARD HILL CHARDONNAY 2023
$90
Super fine, almost achingly so, like a delicate lattice of glass filaments. There’s a quiet power too, a whispered energy. It’s grapefruit zest and wild honey, a little dripped wax and flint. It shimmers and tingles, rides a wave of diamond-edged acidity and finishes in a cloud of crushed chalk. 13% alcohol; 96 points
GIANT STEPS BASTARD HILL PINOT NOIR 2023
$100
Exotic spice woven through vibrant fruits. Some slightly earthier elements too: porcini powder, candied beets. High notes of bergamot and white pepper. It moves with a slippery momentum, plush fruit pulled along by gently buffed tannins and a precise acid line. Complex, composed and a harbinger of great things to come. 13% alcohol; 95 points
GIANT STEPS APPLEJACK VINEYARD PINOT NOIR 2023
$100
From the slightly safer vineyard Ray Guerin planted for himself, and now one of Australia’s greatest pinot sites. Incredibly compressed complexity, like Shakespeare etched on the head of a pin. There’s a char siu meatiness lurking beneath bright cherry fruit. Energy, finesse and a beautifully supple mouthfeel.13.2% alcohol; 97 points