Red Hill
To drink Red Hill Pinot Noir is to shake hands with an ancient volcano with a sea breeze at your back. Our Mornington Peninsula wine tour visits Red Hill, a buckled hump of bush and paddocks forged by layers of lava and bound by sea on three sides: Port Phillip Bay to the west, Western Port Bay to the east and wild and woolly Bass Strait to the south. On a Mornington Peninsula wine tour, the Pinot Noir we taste are enjoyable from the moment they are bottled. They posses a sprightly essence of place with lively perfume, bright fruit and delicate structure.
Red Hill or Burgundy
Across Red Hill, winemakers learn to better understand the rich diversity of the landscape through the lens of the Pinot Noir grape. The wines reflect vineyards planted in ancient soils with a cool maritime climate that produces lighter crops fed by bright sunshine and afternoon sea breezes. In recent vintages, low yields have produced rich and elegant wines that have enhanced the region’s reputation for consistency and quality.
The golden slope of Burgundy is the spiritual home of Pinot Noir where the world’s most heady wines grow. Here, each vineyard is distinctly different and the best sites are located on the south-eastern slope where the sun is diffused with a warmth leading to mild weather, the signature of the continental climate. Four-hundred-and-thirty meters above sea level, Grand Cru vineyards ripen slowly in limestone and clay and warm days and cool nights allow slow ripening and longer time to develop fuller, denser and longer lived wines. The Grand Crus are powerful; amplified by a palate of rich, dark fruits and oriental spices all wrapped-up in velvet tannins with a length of flavour unmatched by any other Pinot Noir in the world.
Filmmaker, Fred Schepisi grows Pinot Noir in the cool maritime climate of Red Hill, 200m above sea level. Every 100m you climb, you drop 1°C in heat summation. Across the ditch, his actor/winemaker comrade, New Zealander, Sam Neill sings to his duck while making Pinot Noir in Central Otago; two-thousand kilometres south-east of Red Hill, three-hundred metres above sea level and one-hundred-and-fifty kilometres from the sea. In the Mornington Peninsula, the warm sun and cool ocean breeze produce finely structured, lightly framed Pinot Noir. In Sam Neill’s vineyard, a marginal climate with rolling grey clouds, less heat and the occasional frost produces darkly perfumed and haunting wines.
Burgundy is the holy grail of Pinot Noir where the best wines possess a charm known as perfumed grace. In French films, dramas are played-out in soft, diffusing light and in the vineyards of Burgundy, soft late-summer light and cool nights ripen fruit slowly with a nightly drop in temperature providing longer hang time for the fruit. This hang-time provides the wine with extra weight, length of flavour and a complex middle palate.
Winemaking
In Red Hill, slopes of volcanic soil, formed by granulated tephra forty-five-million years ago, provide a suitable place to grow Pinot Noir. No vineyard is ever quite the same here as north-facing sites bathe in day-long sunshine while more protected east-facing vineyards avoid the brutal Western sun, often filtered by pine trees- living green shutters to block a searing blowtorch over land. Winemakers dream of making Burgundy here, but they can’t just dial-up the Chambertin Vineyard in Red Hill. This is a very different climate and terroir to the Côte d'Or. They need to seek an expression of the volcanic soils, the salty air and the evenness of day/night temperatures to make well balanced wine with a light structure traceable to the red soils on the hill bound by a cold, southern sea.
