Giant Steps Applejack Pinot Noir 2024: How the legend started, and how it now continues
Giant Steps head winemaker Mel Chester.
The legend of the Applejack Vineyard in the Yarra Valley started in the most unlikely of ways. Indeed, it started with a stroke of bad luck. The vineyard itself was planted by Australian viticultural legend Ray Guerin in the heady vineyard-planting days of 1997, and because Guerin was involved it was planted on a perfect east-facing, steep-sided site both above the valley floor and at a density above conventional. So it had the best possible start in life – in planning and execution terms – and needless to say, given that it’s a cool site, it was appropriately planted to pinot noir and chardonnay only, and with significant clonal diversity in play.
This vineyard is cool because it’s in the Upper Yarra, or more specifically: because it’s at Gladysdale, which is nearer to the upper reaches of the river that carved the valley out. It’s often quoted that the Applejack Vineyard sits around 300 metres above sea level, but Giant Steps’ own website lists it at 180-260 metres, the range being top-to-bottom of the vineyard slope. Elevation is a quirky guide at the best of times: higher is often assumed to be cooler, but isn’t always so. In any case – and this is the important bit – if you taste through the entire range of Giant Steps’ single vineyard wines in their order of lowest (altitute) to highest (altitude), the Applejack wines sit in the middle of the range or, put differently, at neither elevation extremity.
In short, in Yarra Valley terms, Applejack is a Goldilocks site.
If you drive through this terrain or, even better, cycle through it, you’ll notice a few things immediately. It’s treed, it’s foresty, it’s undulating and, in part, it’s seriously steep. When I was at my absolute peak as a cyclist, I was a climber. All I wanted to do was to ride up hills and mountains. I weighed 58 kilograms at the time, which is 18 kilos less than now. I mention this because there was only one pitch that ever got the better of me as a climber, and lead to the ultimate shame of me getting off the bike and walking. That pitch had a gradient near 30 percent, on loose stones. It was in the Upper Yarra.
So sites around here, no matter how close they are to one another, can be vastly different in aspect and/or orientation. Gum trees can also play a key, cooling part: which is where the word Applejack comes in. It’s a beautiful, evocative word in itself, but Applejack is also a (rare) species of eucalyptus tree, unique to Victoria. Whether or not there are Applejack gums growing near the Applejack Vineyard I’m not 100% sure; it would be pretty damn special if there were.
Here’s where the legend part of the Applejack Vineyard’s story starts to form. If you ask Google, or chatgpt, or the general AI universe, to tell you what the first vintage of Giant Steps Applejack Pinot Noir was, it will spit out 2014 as the answer. This is plainly not correct. The first vintage of Giant Steps Applejack Pinot Noir reviewed on The Winefront site was 2010, and Winefront has also reviewed the 2011, 2012 and 2013 releases (and of course every vintage since, including the latest 2024). The reason AI thinks that 2014 was the first release is because Phil Sexton, who founded and was the owner of Giant Steps at the time, bought the Applejack Vineyard in 2013. The 2014 was the first with Giant Steps as the owner of Applejack, but it wasn’t the first Giant Steps Applejack Vineyard Pinot released.
Far from it. Sexton was no doubt well convinced of the quality of grapes coming off the Applejack Vineyard before this, but the events surrounding the release of the Giant Steps Applejack Vineyard Pinot Noir 2012 sure wouldn’t have hurt.
OK. Finally, now, we get to ground zero of the Applejack Vineyard legend. When the 2012 release – which doesn’t exist according to chatgpt, but which was made by Steve Flamsteed – was but a pup, it was entered into the Pinot Noir Class of the Melbourne Wine Show. It went through all the rigours of judging and came out on top, and was therefore awarded the mantle of Best Pinot Noir of Show. It was also awarded a special James Halliday Best Pinot Noir award, at the same show. For good measure, it won the award for Best Victorian Wine.
As great as these achievements are, they would be consigned to the realms of history if it weren’t for one little-known fact: normally, at the Melbourne Wine Show, when you win your varietal category, you then go into the judging for the Jimmy Watson Trophy, aka Australia’s most newsworthy wine prize. So when Giant Steps Applejack Vineyard Pinot Noir 2012 came out top in the Pinot Noir class, it was suddenly within touching distance of the Jimmy Watson Trophy itself. No Pinot Noir had ever won the Jimmy Watson Trophy at this stage, it’s worth pointing out. So it was on the cusp of history.
Or it would have been, except that it was disqualified from the Jimmy Watson Trophy judging. This disqualification was for the best possible reason. To qualify for the Jimmy, you need to have produced a minimum of 250 dozen. This rule exists so that people can actually buy the winning wine but also, to prevent producers from creating specific Made To Win The Jimmy Watson wines. That is, to win the prize, the wine has to be a genuine commercial release.
Which the Giant Steps Applejack Vineyard Pinot Noir 2012 most certainly was. It’s just that, from a steep, cool site, they’d only been able to produce 100 dozen that year. So it was disqualified from the Jimmy Watson Award judging because it was the real deal, from a special place, and rare not by design, but by nature.
Talk about bad luck.
And then the Pinot Noir that had come second to the Applejack wine in the Pinot Noir class – elevated to the trophy judging so that a varietal pinot noir could still be represented – went on to win the Jimmy Watson Trophy itself, and create history. The wine that did this was Yabby Lake’s Block 1 Pinot Noir 2012 – which is a magnificent wine too.
This result meant that the winner of the Jimmy Watson Trophy that year, which was made with pinot noir, did not win its own Pinot Noir class. In 100 years time, when people look back over these results, there will be much head-scratching.
All this though, among those in the know, was enough to make people sit up and take special notice of Giant Steps Applejack Vineyard Pinot Noir. Indeed one of the people who took notice of these events was Mel Chester, who has been the head winemaker at Giant Steps since 2021 but who was not associated with Giant Steps at the time of the events surrounding the 2012 release. But – in a beautiful irony – she was a judge at the Melbourne Wine Show that year, and had bought and followed Applejack Pinot Noir religiously between then and the time when she became its maker.
Results like this are one thing, it should be pointed out, but prosecuting them is quite something else. The legend of just how outstanding the Applejack Vineyard’s grapes are began to form courtesy of the events outlined above, but the story has really got a rev to it because of the wines this vineyard has subsequently grown. The 2023 release won Halliday Wine Companion’s Wine of the Year in 2024. Eight of the past ten releases of the Applejack Pinot Noir have scored 94 (gold medal standard) or higher on The Winefront. The past four vintages of Applejack Vineyard Chardonnay have scored 95 points or higher on The Winefront. The soil type of the Applejack Vineyard is listed on the Giant Steps website as “grey-brown clay loam”. A more potent description of this soil is, as Chester calls it, “caramel clays”, which works for its colour and evocation but also because it’s suggestive of the flow of soil in the Yarra, where both red dirt and dead grey loam sites can be found. Applejack still has some of the red in its clay, or is Goldilocks not just in elevation but in soil. I mention this only because the above results are rare air off the back of a rare patch of vineyard land.
Or, put differently: we are witness to the formation of a modern Australian wine legend.
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The latest Giant Steps Applejack Pinot Noir 2024 has been reviewed and scored on the (subscriber) Winefront site.
Giant Steps’ Bastard Hill vineyard is also worth reading about.
All the 2024 wines from Giant Steps are reviewed and scored on the (subscriber) Winefront site here.
