On Thursday I’ll be profiling Tom Carson, Yering Station’s winemaker, and publishing notes on verticals of the three main wine styles produced at this estimable Australian, relatively cool-climate address. The one overriding impression that my tasting of these wines made was just how amazingly refined his 2005 Pinots, regular and Reserve, are. It is surely possible to taste the fact that Carson has worked in Burgundy – in fact even the regular Yering Station Pinot Noir 2005 Yarra Valley that sells for under £10 at Majestic in the UK, tastes bone dry, delicate and quite remarkably Burgundian. That’s what I call value.
As for the considerably more expensive Yering Station Reserve Pinot Noir 2005 Yarra Valley, it tastes SO ethereal and linear and forest floor fresh that I consider it really rather brave to produce it at all in a country where most reds are so markedly big and beefy. This Reserve wine should ideally be cellared for one to six or seven years.
In these chronological line-ups it was the cool Yarra Valley vintages 2002 and 2005 that showed exceptional refinement, although it was clear that Carson was striving for something more complex than simple juicy fruit even in the hotter years. Carson uses traditional Burgundian techniques: some whole bunches, average yields of about a kilo a vine for the Reserve bottlings and 3.5 kg for the regular. The cap in the 4-tonne open fermenters is plunged by hand and there is just one racking after malolactic fermentation. All Pinot is raised in barrique but new oak is restricted to about a third for the Reserve and a fifth for the regular Pinot.
I urge burgundy lovers to take a look at these 2005s.