The 2021 Hill of Dreams is out now and it’s indeed one of the best wines from the vintage and one of the best (and the most unique), wines we’ve ever made. It definitely wasn’t an easy task though, given the amount of rain and humidity we experienced in the summer of 2021.

The key was in sorting! Our picking team did an awesome job during the harvest to select only healthy, grapes often berry by berry, which is incredibly important when making low intervention wines. We estimate that 40% of the fruit sadly ended up on the ground – rejected due to Botrytis infection.

Sauvignon Blanc, Verdejo & Gruner Veltliner were picked together (creating a field-blend) at lower potential alcohol but at full phenolic ripeness resulting in array of fresh zesty flavours like jalapenos, lemon peel, lime juice & hay. Bunches were de-stemmed, crushed and the skins were included in the fermentation to add to the textural honey & lime peel like bittersweet finish. Spontaneously fermented with no additions and bottled unfiltered, un-fined to catch up all the natural beauty of the hill plot. This is honest wine made with minimal intervention to express its place of origin. Fragrant, textured and utterly delicious.

Get your Hill of Dreams HERE ($40)

Story of the Hill of Dreams

The first edition of the Hill of Dreams comes from the dark year of 2019. Do you remember?

Whole vineyard was wiped out by the Tingha bushfire resulting many vines being completely lost and the harvest finished before it started. With one exception – the Hill of Dreams – which, once again, proved that it is the very special spot in our vineyard.

It was the Hill of Dreams where the first vines were planted at Topper’s Mountain property more than 20 years ago.

Mark Kirkby thought that the poor gravelly soil and north/south aspect of the hill might the best place for grape vines and it appeared he was right! But there’s always a catch. Mostly red varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz were initially planted on the hill but due to large amount of surrounding gum trees the red grapes used to get tainted with too much eucalyptus oil to the extent when some wines tasted more like a toothpaste. As mint taint has much smaller impact on white varieties the hill was consequently replanted with Sauvignon Blanc (0.6ha), Verdejo (0.2ha) and most recently Grüner Veltliner (0.15ha). On top of that the hill has been farmed in strictly organic regime since 2018.

Now back to the 2019. The poor character of the soil is responsible for naturally low yields which adds to better concentration and intensity of flavour as well as to earlier ripeness of the fruit (also thanks to the inclination and north/west aspect). All of that means that we usually harvest the hill a couple of weeks earlier than the fruit from the larger undulating ‘main’ block. Thanks to that we were able to harvest the hill just few days before the fires hit the vineyard.

Story of the Wine

For a long time Sauvignon Blanc was the only white variety on the hill and in the most vintages it produced stellar expressions of the variety. Once we started to experiment with new varietal additions – Verdejo and later Grüner Veltliner – we also changed the winemaking ‘recipe’. Our goal was and still is to make an extraordinary wine from this extraordinary place, wine of terroir.

We decided to employ skin maceration through the fermentation to achieve more textural style, followed by spontaneous MLF and eight months of maturation in old oak. We also avoided any additions with exception of a dash of SO2 prior bottling to let the terroir shine through.

Mike Bennie on the Hill of Dreams 2019:
This is good orange wine, really chewy, dry, flavoursome, savoury, loaded with fresh acidity and bursting out of the glass with perfume. There’s a slightly ashy character over strong, tart citrus fruit, light passionfruit, green herb. That faint ash seems whipped into the wine, neatly. Impressive tannins here, great length, a vibrancy and generally just a very moreish drink. It’ll perform best with rich food, I suspect, and best not drunk on its own, such is the intensity of tannin in this wine. 93pts.

This wine is another result of our unorthodox yet authentic approach to grape-growing and winemaking and the effort to challenge the boundaries of our terroir.

If you made all the way here please excuse my wordy expression ;-). It’s hard to hold myself back when it comes to our Hill of Dreams project.