Giaconda – a most unusual Aussie

‘We’re consuming about a fifth of the entire UK allocation today', was the disarming introduction to a recent tasting conducted in London by Rick Kinzbrunner of Giaconda in Beechworth, the old Victorian mining town in the Australian state of Victoria. Encouraged by head of generic promotion Laura Jewell MW, who is presumably keen to demonstrate Australia’s fine-wine prowess, he presented this vertical of his revered Chardonnays and his rather more recently conceived Shiraz in Australia House.

Very much his own man, as you can read in my 2002 account of a visit to Beechworth, he does not belong to the...