In 1979, Phillip Jones abandoned his telecommunications career to plant the first vines in Gippsland—a large, but until then, mostly unexplored wine region east of Melbourne. His aspiration: to make a great Australian Bordeaux. Cabernet, however, struggled to ripen in the cool, maritime climate. Instead, it was his three rows of Pinot Noir that would ultimately make him a wine industry star with his first release under the Bass Phillip label in 1991.
Jones’s ultra-premium Pinots put Gippsland on the map. The price for his first top-tier Reserve bottling was higher than any Pinot in Australia ever. Today, it’s the most expensive Australian wine available in the U.S., priced at upwards of $1,000 USD a bottle.
But for over three decades, Jones was an outlier in a vast region with few producers and a reputation as backwater cousin to the more glamorous Mornington Peninsula and hip Yarra Valley regions. Gippsland’s image is finally beginning to shift; it was described in the 2023 book How to Drink Australian, by U.S. sommeliers Jane Lopes and Jonathan Ross, as “one of the most exciting in all of Australia.”
Image Courtesy of Entropy Wines
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The buzz is not coming from large corporate producers—they haven’t reached Gippsland (yet)—but from a steadily increasing number of experienced, well-traveled, small-scale producers who have invested their own cash in a region they believe is destined for greatness. It’s just two hours from one
This Article was originally published on Wine Enthusiast
