Dappled Single Vineyard Lieu-dit Upper Yarra Valley Pinot Noir 2025

Dappled Single Vineyard Lieu-dit Upper Yarra Valley Pinot Noir 2025

100% single vineyard from Gladysdale in the upper reaches of the Yarra Valley.

The fruit is hand-picked, sorted and chilled overnight to 12 degrees to enable a 5-day cold soak to occur. The fruit is gently destemmed (70% whole berry) and 30% whole bunch is included… It’s then left to commence spontaneous fermentation with the natural vineyard yeasts. The ferment is lightly pigéaged (foot stomped) and hand plunged daily,spending about 3 weeks on skins. The finished wine is pressed straight to French puncheons and barriques (10% new), undergoing natural MLF in its own time and kept on lees until bottling. The wine is in oak for 10 months with further aging in stainless before being bottled via gravity. Unfined and unfiltered.

'This is from an Upper Yarra site at Gladysdale. It’s the only Pinot Noir that Dappled will release from the 2025 vintage.

I’d say that this is in impeccably good form – but it’s better than that. In Pinot Noir terms there is no better way to spend $50 this year. It’s a wine of firmness and intensity, breadth and length, and in both complexity and mouthfeel terms it’s spot on. It tastes of woodsy spices, red cherries, marzipan, smoked cedar, elaborate herb notes and pure bright cranberry, with undergrowth characters woven like electricity cables throughout. It’s a gem of a wine and more.'

95 Points - Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front