Irrewarra Pinot Noir 2022
£37.95
The wine
Elegant, with sweet and sour cherries and complex earth and spice characters.
Pinot Noir needs a cool site and a long season, and it turns jammy and loses the perfume that makes it worth growing if picked warm, so restraint in the vineyard matters more than anything done in the cellar. Irrewarra planted their vineyard in 2001 at the top of a north-facing slope, which in Australia is the aspect that catches the sun, on soils that drain hard and keep yields naturally low.
The producer
Irrewarra
View all Irrewarra winesIrrewarra is a project by Nick Farr, the winemaker behind By Farr's Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Branching out from Geelong, he went looking for a new frontier in Western Victoria, about 150 kilometres west of Melbourne near the small town that gives the wines their name. Irrewarra is an Aboriginal term meaning long spear throw, and nods to the area's heritage of traditional hunting and farming.
The landscape is agrarian and exposed, and it receives a great deal of rain: around 750 millimetres a year, which is generous by Australian standards and brings its own problems as well as its advantages. Cool, wet and windy is a difficult combination to farm, but it is also the combination that produces Pinot Noir and Chardonnay of genuine tension, and it is why the frontier was worth pursuing at all.
The winemaking follows the By Farr philosophy rather than departing from it: hand picking, indigenous-yeast fermentation, a proportion of whole bunches where the vintage supports it, and maturation in French oak with new wood kept in proportion to the fruit. The wines are made in small quantities and are recognisably from the same hand as the Geelong bottlings, but from a colder and more marginal place.
