Gippsland VICTORIA

SAMANTHA PAYNE discovers the untapped final frontier in cool-climate wines in Victoria’s south-east.

- SAMANTHA PAYNE

Wine industry professionals are often asked to predict the next big trend or which region has great wines they might not have tried.

What started as quiet murmurings among pinot noir lovers at tastings has now become shouts above the din, as more people are looking towards Gippsland and beginning to realise there’s something special happening in this largely undiscovered region in Victoria’s south-east.

You could say this is our final frontier – there are not many genuine cool-climate regions left in Australia that are untapped the way Gippsland is.

“There is no question in my mind that the greatest vineyard in Gippsland hasn’t even been planted yet – the Holy Grail is still out there,” says Marcus Satchell from Dirty Three Wines. And he would know, born and bred in Gippsland (with brief winemaking stints in other places), there are very few sites in South Gippsland that Satchell hasn’t been involved with in some way.

But how does this happen to a region with so much potential and evident quality of fruit? Satchell explains, “when vineyard expansion was happening in the ’90s, Gippsland just got overlooked – we weren’t as established as other cool-climate regions, like Tassie, which had already done all the hard work of branding and marketing by the big companies. Now it’s on us (myself and the other producers) to push the region forward.”