2024 Moorooduc Estate Garden Vineyard Pinot Noir

The Garden Vineyard lies just over the hill from Moorooduc's home block, owned by the McFall family and leased and managed by the estate for more than a decade. Its Pinot Noir sits on north and west-facing slopes over a dense clay subsoil that keeps the vines quiet and the crop small. This is also the one wine where Moorooduc breaks its own rule: every other red here is destemmed, and this one goes into the fermenter with one hundred percent whole bunches, twenty days on skins, then seventeen months on lees in French oak. Bottled unfined and unfiltered.

The difference is immediate. Dark cherry, raspberry and pomegranate arrive wrapped in violet, dried herb and exotic spice, with a touch of orange rind and Campari lifting out of the whole-bunch ferment. Fine-grained tannin and fresh acidity hold it together, and there is a woodsy, herbal edge running underneath that the other two simply do not have. Campbell Mattinson called it a complex release with stem character.