That Bastard Hill vineyard
Giant Steps will release its first wines from the Bastard Hill vineyard on 21 August, 2024.
This is the story behind the Giant Steps Bastard Hill Chardonnay 2023 and the Giant Steps Bastard Hill Pinot Noir 2023.
For the past twenty years the Bastard Hill vineyard has been a crying shame of Australian wine. It’s a great vineyard, steep, unlikely, born of rainforest, a literal pain in the neck. The crying shame is not that it’s been used and abused but rather, that it’s not been used, and not been abused. It’s been written off by its big company owner as too hard to work, and too hard to sell. The oxygen of every great endeavour is imagination and this vineyard, save for the visionaries who planted it in the mid 1980s, has been starved of it. As a result the Bastard Hill vineyard, named for obvious reasons, has been left to sleep out there on its steep mountain slopes as the bastard child of the companies formerly known as Hardy’s. As a result this should-be-great vineyard has been kept hidden away, myth-like, talked about but not seen, and rarely tasted, like a giant, an unlikely giant, a sleeping one.
This vineyard, in the upper reaches of the Yarra Valley, planted in 1986, was the future before we knew what the future was. It’s steep, cool, individual and hard, so hard in fact that this great vineyard site is, at nearly 40 years old, probably still most widely known for its contribution to the 1990s glory days of Eileen Hardy chardonnay.
And yet everyone who gets it knows that this place is one hell of worth it.
And yet everyone who gets it knows that this vineyard has, simply, been waiting for someone to love it into greatness.
It’s hard for the lay person to know exactly what a vineyard needs to kiss it back to life. But every lay person knows how it feels, and what it means. In 2022, the owners of the Giant Steps winery – the US-based Jackson Family Wines – did what the locals told them to do and walked up the hill and bought the Bastard Hill vineyard. What the vineyard saw when it opened its eyes to its new custodians was something it had not seen or known in a long time, but had always desperately needed. What the Bastard Hill vineyard saw, in the people now charged to tend it, was excitement.
This excitement is not of nothing. Indeed, now, in 2024, suddenly, it seems foretold. Every great story needs a sentry. It now seems as if this vineyard on this mountain had scouted ahead and waited there for its destiny. The Giant Steps winery has bought the sleeping giant.
We’re here, Giant Steps said.
The bastard land, finally, was allowed to wake.
Now we make, it said.
And now they have. Giant Steps’ preparation for this moment has been long and specific. It’s been about lands, little lands, slices. Terroir is best measured in coffee spoons; in mornings, evenings, and afternoons. Tarraford. Sexton. Wombat Creek. Primavera. Applejack. And the vineyards honoured but along the way lost: Arthurs Creek, Tosq, Nocton, Lusatia. Phil Sexton, Steve Flamsteed, Jackson Family Wines and the ruler of Giant Steps now: Melanie Chester. These lands and these people and the teams by their side; these carriages and creators of history; these shoulders. It’s taken a river to reach the source of it.
Two wines, a sleeping giant, a small step, a giant one. A bastard of a hill, and a dream. There are moments in wine that take time itself, and add a shiver to it.
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I tasted a wine earlier this year, blind, at a big tasting. Beside one of these wines I placed an asterisk. The wine turned out to be Giant Steps Bastard Hill Chardonnay 2023. The asterisk always means: I want to know more.
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At this tasting I wrote: “Fine, long and chalky. Bony but not underdone. Elegant. Unreal. What is this? It’s something.”
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Mid winter, the past two years, I’ve sat and tasted with Melanie Chester, the single vineyard wines of Giant Steps, pinot noir and chardonnay, sans of course Bastard Hill. When I taste with Chester she always credits her team. She credits her predecessor, Steve Flamsteed. Every good idea or decision is always someone else’s. It’s what the best people do; they don’t hoover the credit, they shed it. Because they can.
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This time last year I asked Chester to explain her art of chardonnay winemaking. She said, “Every berry for Giant Steps is hand picked. It’s all sorted in the vineyard. We cool overnight, and then press super gently. All the chardonnays are whole bunch pressed. We check the baumé, then dump it all to barrel, and let it ferment naturally. We don’t add anything, but we are across every single barrel, and I mean fully across every barrel. We make sure that every barrel goes through healthy, which is why I think our wines are so fresh and textured.
“We let everything oxidise up during fermentation, and then we handle everything reductively from there. We lock them up and let them rest. Our house style isn’t reductive.”
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The visionaries who planted the Bastard Hill vineyard were David Paxton and Ray Guerin. Guerin also planted the Applejack vineyard. Guerin is known and recognised for his work on many different vineyards, in various Australian states, but if he’d only ever worked on these two sites, he’d still be indexed under the word ‘wow’.
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Now we drink. Two boxes arrived on my doorstep this morning, each from the 2023 ripening season. In these boxes, among others, were the two Bastard Hill wines. It was cold out, as I opened them. I shivered. Vineyards have the turning circle of a ship. When you run a vineyard like Bastard Hill, if you run it well, your sleeves are never rolled down. There’s replanting, there’s fencing, there’s more tribulation than triumph. We’re only now at the end of the start, or at the start of the future. Some roads are so long that it’s best to just sleep through them. Now though, we’re awake. We’re growing. And finally, we have something.
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end.
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Formal reviews of all the 2023 Giant Steps single vineyard wines have all now been posted on The Winefront. These include reviews of the 2023 Giant Steps Bastard Hill Chardonnay, the Giant Steps Bastard Hill Pinot Noir 2023 and the Giant Steps Applejack Vineyard Pinot Noir 2023.
The Giant Steps 2023 Single Vineyard wines will all be released on 21 August, 2024.
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Footnote: The last time I tasted a wine from the Bastard Hill vineyard, prior to a few months ago, was a wine called Hardy’s Bastard Hill Chardonnay 2013. There’s a note of it on The Winefront site but I’m happy to quote it here: “It’s hard to go past this wine. It has presence. It has fruit flavour too, plenty of it, wrapped in a blanket of spent matchsticks and smoky oak, the runs of oatmeal and spice kept secondary by the pour of stonefruit. (This is a wine of) fundamental and emphatic quality. 95+ points. Whomever made this wine should feel proud. I bet it’s still drinking beautifully.
Giant Steps is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.
I love this (supplied) photo of winemaker Melanie Chester, at work in the Giant Steps winery.
