Bindi

There’s a great cliche in cool-climate winemaking that the very best wines come from the warmest sites. Bindi is a very special vineyard on such a site, a basin-shaped heat-trap south of the small town of Gisborne in Victoria’s little-known Macedon region. It’s perhaps an unlikely place to many people from which to anticipate some of the country’s leading chardonnay and pinot noir, but Bindi has a lot more going for it than the average vineyard.

Bindi’s vineyard is managed by its founder, Bill Dhillon, a complex and fastidious individual who ensures that it’s not only picture-perfect to his demanding eye, but is perfectly focused on ripening its small yields of carefully exposed crops. The property’s main Original vineyard comprises greyish loams over granitic gravels, interspersed with surface outcrops of quartz stones. They drain well, are anything but excessively fertile and, under constant threat from Dhillon’s ever-present secateurs, present no concerns over excessive vigour. Some of the newer sites on the higher slopes above the existing vineyards, including the excellent Block Five pinot noir vineyard, are stony, mean and bony, perfectly exposed to intercept sun and produce even more concentrated fruit of individual character.

For at Bindi there’s little doubt that terroir is the most important influence on wine style, even if the wise head behind its winemaking is none other than the legendary Victorian, Stuart Anderson, founding winemaker of Balgownie and today a very active and only partially retired winemaking consultant in the Macedon region. Bindi’s wines are utterly distinctive and individual, and although they have only been made for a decade, are already faithful in the way they express the unique qualities of its location.

Tight-knit, reserved and austere in its youth, Bindi’s Chardonnay presents just the sort of purity and concentration you’d expect from well-ripened fruit harvested at two tonnes per acre and below. Like the Pinot Noir, it’s given the full Burgundian treatment under Anderson’s watchful eye, finishing flinty and even steely – a perfect mirror of the conditions in which it is grown.

Quite unlike the better pinot noirs of the Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula, Geelong and Gippsland, Bindi’s style is unctuous, concentrated and fleshy, with a rose garden fragrance and a deeply spiced expression of dark cherry and tomato stalk flavour. Even in their youth they suggest forest floor complexity and hints of game, but this is the vineyard speaking, not the overly ambitious and potentially disastrous results of the hands-free winemaking techniques so popular with pinot today.

Today most of the winemaking is handled by Bill Dhillon’s son, Michael, himself an intense and avid student of wine and wine production. With Stuart Anderson, the younger Dhillon has begun to separate out key parcels from the smallish main run of Bindi wine, with minimal impact on the ‘Original Vineyard’ wines that remain. Made from a portion of the vineyard where the quartz stones come to the surface, The Quartz Chardonnay first appeared in the 1995 vintage and was not repeated until 1998. Its wines offer a combination of concentration, elegance and steely fineness rarely seen from this country.

From a higher, separate and more exposed site, the Block Five Pinot Noir made its debut in 1997 with an alluring, deeply flavoured and savoury wine, followed up with another of almost comparable quality in 1998. Made in upsettingly small volumes, Bindi’s classically structured, savoury and bone-dry sparkling Macedon blends of pinot noir and chardonnay simply add lustre to its emerging status amongst our best and most versatile cooler climate vineyards. Please login to post comment